A Brief History of FAI, Which Began 25 Years Ago

On Dec 21st, 1999 version 1.0 of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) was announced. That was 25 years ago.

Some months before, the computer science department of the University of Cologne bought a small HPC cluster with 16 nodes (each with dual CPU Pentium II 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM) and I was too lazy to install those nodes manually. That's why I started the FAI project. With FAI you can install computers in a few minutes from scratch to a machine with a custom configuration that is ready to go for their users.

At that time Debian 2.1 aka slink was using kernel 2.0.36 and it was the first release using apt. Many things have happened since then.

In the beginning we wrote the first technical report about FAI and a lot of documentation were added afterwards. I gave more than 45 talks about FAI all over the world. Over the past 25 years, there has been an average of more than one commit per day to the FAI software repository.

Several top500.org HPC clusters were built using FAI and many companies are using FAI for their IT infrastructure or deploying Linux on their products using FAI. An overview of users can be found here.

Some major milestones of FAI are listed in the blog post of the 20th anniversary.

What Happended in the Last 5 Years?

• Live images can be created
• Writeable data partition on USB sticks
• FAIme web service creates custom live ISOs
• Support for Alpine Linux and Arch Linux package managers
• Automatic detect a local config space
• Live and installation images for Debian for new hardware using a backports kernel or using the Debian testing release
• The FAIme web services created more than 30.000 customized ISOs

Currently, I'm preparing for the next FAI release and I still have ideas for new features.

Thanks for all the feedback from you, which helped a lot in making FAI a successful project.

About FAI

FAI is a tool for unattended mass deployment of Linux. It's a system to install and configure Linux systems and software packages on computers as well as virtual machines, from small labs to large-scale infrastructures like clusters and cloud environments. You can take one or more virgin PC's, turn on the power, and after a few minutes, the systems are installed, and completely configured to your exact needs, without any interaction necessary.