hacking on kickstart

[Lonni J Friedman]

Greetings,
I'm trying to get the latest ubuntu release (6.10) to install via
kickstart.  Over a week ago, I
downloaded the DVD ISOs, expanded them onto a server, and actually got
both 32 & 64bit 6.10 versions installing perfectly via kickstart.  Today,
I actually went to do a nother kickstart based installation, and it
blows up immediately
claiming that one of the files that it needs is missing from the server.
The installer doesn't bother to tell me which file it can't find, so I
actually had to check the apache log on the server to see what
genrated the 404, and its
nic-restricted-firmware-2.6.17-10-generic-di_2.6.17.6-1_amd64.udeb.

Now, I've got a nic-restricted-firmware, however the one i've got is
nic-restricted-firmware-2.6.17-10-generic-di_2.6.17.5-11_amd64.udeb, which
is seemingly an older version.

What I really would love to understand here is where the installer is
coming up with this version, and how come it was quite happy with the
version I had a week ago, but now it wants something newer?

My best guess is that its querying some updates server somewhere on
the internet, which I do not want it to do.  Surely there must be a
way to have the install run without querying for updates, right?

I asked on the ubuntu-users mailing list, and got no responses.  I
also asked on the ubuntu forums and got no responses.  I've scoured
the internet for documentation on how Ubuntu's kickstart is supposed
to work, and the best I could come up with was this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility

which is very lacking in technical details.  Even more frustrating is
that the link to the maintainer
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ColinWatson is a wiki 'this page
doens't exist yet' page, so I can't even figure out how to contact
Colin Watson.

If someone could just point me to where this is documented, I'd be
very grateful.  Even better would be contact information for whomever
currently maintains the kickstart portion of ubuntu, as I actually
have quite a few other less critical issues I'd love to discuss.
thanks!

-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org