NM config after PXE/NFS live CD install

[Sven Ulland]

On 04/09/2013 03:26 PM, Daniel Manrique wrote:
>> Hi, all. How can I avoid ending up with an unconfigured
>> NetworkManager after installing Ubuntu via a PXE/NFS-booted live CD
>> image?
>
> I've been handling this with a custom success_command entry in the
> preseed. If you're remastering CDs to modify the pxelinux cfg, you
> could also add this to the CD's ubuntu.seed file.
>
> ubiquity ubiquity/success_command string \
>   in-target sed -i -e 's/inet manual/inet dhcp/' /etc/network/interfaces; \
>   true

Great tip, thanks! I've simply added an url=http://.../ubuntu.seed
parameter to the kernel cmdline. In that file, I first tried to figure
out how to escape things properly with:

ubiquity \
ubiquity/success_command string \
in-target sh -c "echo -e 'auto lo\niface lo inet loopback' > 
/etc/network/interfaces"

..but it never seemed to run, possibly due to poor handling of the \n.
I tried escaping it with \\n, \\\n, and so on, but still no success.
It's a pain to wait for the full install to complete every time, so
debugging has been slow. I'm currently testing a silly workaround:

in-target wget -O/etc/network/interfaces http://.../interfaces_lo_only

I'll let you know how it goes. I'd rather get the echo command
working, or at least something simple that doesn't depend on fetching
a file from the outside.

Side notes:
* The preseed docs say 'preseed/url' works like 'url' on the cmdline.
   That's not the case:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/casper/+bug/1167212

* Not having "d-i apt-setup/extras boolean true" (default false) and
   "tasksel tasksel/first multiselect ubuntu-desktop" (default none) in
   ubuntu.seed seems to have no effect on the end result, even though.
   I haven't figured out why.

sven