FAI, the Fully Automatic Installation is a network installation system for the installation and configuration of the operation system and all your applications on all your hosts. The whole installation only takes a few minutes without any interaction necessary.
The FAI project startet in 1999 as a bare metal provisioning tool for Debian GNU/Linux only. Today it's also used for deploying different Linux distributions like Ubuntu, CentOS, Scientific Linux or Suse on real hardware or virtual hosts. For FAI there's no difference in installing a real machine, a virtual machine, setting up a chroot environment or creating a Live CD.
Configuration files are shared among groups of similar computers using the class concept, so you need not create a configuration for every new host. Besides network installations, FAI also supports installation from CD or USB stick and can be extended easily.
The talk will show why FAI is the universal deployment tool.
URLs: http://fai-project.org