bionic (8) fai-cd.8.gz

Provided by: fai-server_5.3.6ubuntu1_all bug

NAME

       fai-cd - make a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick that performs an FAI

SYNOPSIS

       fai-cd [OPTION] -m MIRROR ISOFILE
       fai-cd [OPTION] -B FILE
       fai-cd [OPTION] -d URL
       fai-cd [OPTION] -S IMAGEFILE

DESCRIPTION

       This  command creates a bootable ISO CD-ROM image that performs the fully automatic installation from CD-
       ROM without an install server. The ISO image will be written to FILE. To create the  image,  the  command
       needs  the  NFSROOT,  the  configuration  space and optionally a partial mirror, which is created by fai-
       mirror. The ISO image will contain a compressed squashfs filesystem. This hybrid CD  image  can  also  be
       written to an USB stick using dd(1).

OPTIONS

       -A     Create a boot only CD image (also usable for an USB stick) with autodiscover function. The CD will
              scan the subnet for a FAI server. By default it shows a menu  with  all  profiles  available  from
              which  you  can  select  a  type  of installation. This image only needs 25MB.  You can add the -J
              option to make the image smaller.

       -B     Create a boot only ISO image which does a network installation. It does not include  the  nfsroot,
              the  partitial  mirror  and  the  config  space;  however  for  it  to  automatically initiate the
              installation -d has to be set. By default CONFIG_SRC will be empty.

       -b     After creating the ISO image burn it by calling wodim(1) (a version of cdrecord).

       -C CFDIR
              Use CFDIR as the configuration directory. Default is /etc/fai. You can also  set  the  environment
              variable FAI_ETC_DIR.

       -d URL Do not include the config space in the image and set the location of the config space to URL. This
              sets FAI_CONFIG_SRC in the grub config, which is obtained from the FAI configuration dir (see -C).
              Set  it  to "" to not set FAI_CONFIG_SRC. If not set, the config space is taken from FAI_CONFIGDIR
              and copied to /var/lib/fai/config in the image. Currently no file: is allowed  here,  instead  set
              FAI_CONFIGDIR in fai.conf(5).

       -e     Exclude  the  directory  /var/tmp  from  the  nfsroot.  You  may  put  the file base.tar.xz in the
              configuration space into the subdirectory basefiles. This option will  save  about  50MB  of  disk
              space. This option will exclude the directory even when -H is given.

       -f     Force removal of an existing ISO image before creating a new one.

       -g FILE
              Use  FILE  as  grub  grub.cfg  file. The script will look for FILE in CFDIR. If FILE is located in
              another directory then a full path must be specified. If not specified, use /etc/fai/grub.cfg.

       -h     Show simple help and version.

       -H     Do not hide directories. Using this option will consume about 45MB more disk space on your  media.
              By default, some directories like man pages and locales are hidden and will not be put onto the CD
              or the USB stick.

       -J     Use xz compression when calling mksquashfs. Default is gzip.

       -M     Do not add the package mirror to the CD. Packages that  would  be  fetched  from  the  mirror  are
              obtained from the normal sources configured elsewhere, usually remote repositories.

       -m DIRECTORY
              Use DIRECTORY as partial FAI mirror. This option is mandatory, unless you use -M or -B.

       -S     Create  a squashfs image file instead of a complete iso. The image contains the nfsroot and can be
              fetched through various ways over the network. For an example, see the section "FAI  without  NFS"
              in the FAI Guide.

EXAMPLES

       After you've created a mirror with fai-mirror in /media/mirror, you can create a CD using:

          # fai-cd -m /media/mirror fai-cd.iso

       If you want to create a bootable USB stick (here /dev/sdf) , write the CD image to the stick via dd(1).

          # dd if=fai-cd.iso of=/dev/sdf bs=1M

       It  is  possible  to  install over the network without using NFS, i.e. by getting the nfsroot via an http
       request. To do so you have to create a squashfs image using the following command:

          # fai-cd -S squashfs.img

       In addition to that you can create said image without a config space and without a mirror. This is useful
       for  when  you  want  to  avoid  creating  a new image after modifying your config space or updating your
       mirror:

          # fai-cd -d "" -SMeJ squashfs.img

       To fetch the image via http, use the following kernel command line option:

          root=live:http://your_server_or_IP/path/to/squashfs.img

       Create the autodiscover boot image:

          # fai-cd -JAg /etc/fai/grub.cfg.autodiscover fai-autod.iso

NOTES

       Additional kernel command line options can be found in the man page of  dracut.cmdline(7).  fai-cd  needs
       enough disk space in TMPDIR (/tmp by default) for creating the compressed filesystem. You may want to set
       it to another directories, before calling fai-cd.

SEE ALSO

       fai-mirror(1)

       mksquashfs(1)

FILES

       /etc/fai/fai.conf
              The FAI configuration file.
       /etc/fai/grub.cfg
              The default grub2 menu configuration file for fai-cd.

AUTHOR

       Thomas Lange <lange@informatik.uni-koeln.de>