hands off install

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 11:55:59AM -0600, Carl Karsten wrote:

> >>> My Kickstart test machine has two network cards, so I don't believe
> >>> that's true. Preseeding netcfg/choose_interface to eth1 (or whatever)
> >>> should do the job; in the netboot case, you'll have to do this on the
> >>> kernel command line (netcfg/choose_interface=eth1).
> >>
> >> I am focusing on netboot, so preseed doesn't apply.
> >
> > I don't understand this statement. Why not?
> 
> um, guessing misunderstanding on what is/isn't "preseed" - I only 
> considered it the file, not kernel options.  netboot will only read it 
> over the lan, so the file can't be used to set network settings.
> 
> If "preseed" includes kernel parameters, then it does apply.

Setting debconf questions from the kernel command line is still more or
less preseeding; but in any case there're a number of questions after
choosing the network interface that you still need to preseed, and you
might as well use a preseed URL for those.

> I do if I want to use a floppy, which could be useful for both testing 
> and production.
> 
> In both cases, having the preseed.cfg file on media that is physically 
> near the box makes it very easy to figure out what file will be used by 
> the box.  Yes, the same level of configuration can be achieved by 
> different pxelinux.cfg/default files that are keyed on the MAC of the 
> box.  That just seems like extra work that isn't needed in some cases.

True. In general it would be nice to clean up preseed to work more like
the way our Kickstart startup process does. This won't happen for Hoary,
though, and I'd like to do this in cooperation with d-i upstream.

> Quick reiteration: I am more interested in helping the Ubuntu project 
> than getting Hoary on my 5 or 6 boxes, so feel free to tell me "not now, 
> file a low priority report and maybe it will be considered for Grumpy."

That's "Breezy" nowadays. :-) I wouldn't dream of stopping you posting
here though, and I'll do what I can to improve things within the limited
time left before Hoary. If I think something needs to be postponed, I'll
certainly say so.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]