I've spent the last couple of days trying to deploy Fedora CoreOS to some physical hardware/bare metal for a colleague using the official PXE installer from Fedora CoreOS. It wasn't very pleasant, and just wouldn't work reliably.
Maybe my expectations were to high, in that I thought I could use Ignition to prepare more of the system for me, as my colleague has been able to bare metal installs correctly. I just tried to use Ignition as documented.
A few interesting aspects I encountered:
- The PXE installer for it has a 618MB initrd file. This takes quite a while to transfer via tftp!
- It can't build software RAID for the main install device (and the developers have no intention of adding this), and it seems very finicky to build other RAID sets for other partitions.
- And, well, I just kept having problems where the built systems would hang during boot for no obvious reason.
- The time to do an installation was incredibly long.
- The initrd image is really just running coreos-installer against the nominated device.
During the night I got feed up with that process and wrote a Fully Automatic Installer (FAI) profile that'd install CoreOS instead. I can now use setup-storage from FAI using it's standard disk_config files. This allows me to build complicated disk configurations with software RAID and LVM easily.
A big bonus is that a rebuild is a lot faster, timed from typing reboot to a fresh login prompt is 10 minutes - and this is on physical hardware so includes BIOS POST and RAID controller set up, twice each.
I thought this might be of interest to other people, so the FAI profile I developed for this is located here: https://github.com/catalyst-cloud/fai-profile-fedora-coreos
FAI was initially developed to deploy Debian systems, it has since been extended to be able to install a number of other operating systems, however I think this is a good example of how easy it is to deploy non-Debian derived operating systems using FAI without having to modify FAI itself.
