Kickstart support info

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 10:28:08AM -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
> I'm looking at Ubuntu to replace a bunch of RH machines, and well, from
> the little I looked at it, installing ubuntu or debian with d-i is very
> tedious. I'm not even sure what's possible or what isn't (the docs I
> found were sparse), and when you get something wrong, the installer
> falls out of automatic mode, and you have to guess how to fix it.
> Maybe I missed some docs that make this less painful, but 
> http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s07.html#automatic-install
> or the ubuntu equivalent page, don't give a lot of info.

Most things that the code can do are possible; there are a few
exceptions, mostly in the partitioner. Preseeding (don't call this
automatic installation mode "d-i", please - Kickstart is part of our d-i
too) is direct control of the debconf database. Our Kickstart support is
in fact more or less a translation layer on top of preseeding, so mixing
the two is entirely possible.

> My requirements are:
> - I need a fully automated install: the installer cannot stop to ask
>   questions, it has to do a full unattended install

That should be possible. If it isn't, I consider it a high-priority bug.

> - I absolutely need %pre and %post support

That's fine. Note that the only interpreter available outside the chroot
is /bin/sh.

> - md and lvm would be nice, but they don't seem supported yet, and I can
>   probably kludge in %pre as long as the installer then knows who to use
>   the partitions I created and mounted

Yeah, those are two of the partitioning-related exceptions I mentioned
above. Disk detection before %pre will be fun (though the way hotplug
happens early may save you here, provided that your disk modules are in
the initrd), and you may have to preseed a few bits of the partitioner
by hand, which is likely to be messy. I'm sorry this is far from ideal
as yet.

Basically you'll need to mount /target etc., and then convince the
partitioner to run straight through without modifying anything.

> I can fixup auth after the fact if you don't support it, by just
> dropping config files in %post, as I already do anyway.

Right.

> Stuff like this has to work though:
> network --bootproto dhcp --device=eth0
> (it can't stop to ask for eth0 or eth1. Ideally, it would dhcp on both
> interfaces and use the first one it got an answer on, but hardcoding
> eth0 would be ok)

That's fine. --device=auto will try the first one it can find with a
link (assuming MII/ethtool works).

> For the rest, random package questions, I'm hoping I can delay those until
> after they get installed (haven't looked into how debconf seeding for
> random packages works, or how ubuntu pre-answers questions for so many
> debian packages)

The only question that ever gets asked is the X resolutions question,
and even that's only on certain hardware. Last I checked that was hard
to preseed; I haven't rechecked with Hoary final yet.

> So what do you say: do I have a shot with kickstart or should I resign
> myself to d-i and hope I can make it work?

As I said above, they aren't mutually exclusive. You can try Kickstart
for the subset of things that Kickstart supports, and use a preseed file
for fine control. It's unlikely that many things not supported by
preseed will be supported by Kickstart, but they may be easier to set
up.

> BTW where are the latest docs:
> http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/KickstartCompatibility looks a bit old
> 
> http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hoary/main/installer-i386/current/doc/manual/en/ch04s06.html#id2531034
> looks newer (BTW, it's not exactly easy to find :)

The latter is the best I currently have available, I'm afraid. I believe
it has a complete list of differences from the referenced Red Hat
documentation.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]