I have just finished setting up a preseeded d-i for some servers at work, and I'm in general very impressed. One thing which I found missing was a way to do more complicated partitioning via preseeding. What we wanted was a 2 or 4 disk raid used as the PV for an LVM containing all the partitions, with /boot on a 2 disk raid. This is not currently possible with pure preseeding, so I wrote a udeb which replaces partman-base in the menu and runs a script in it's postinst to do all the partitioning, formatting and mounting etc.
As a follow up to that I'd like to propose a more general way of doing this and would like comments on it. What I envisage is a udeb for a partitioner specifically for complicated preseeding. It would take an input similar to this: http://mjj29.matthew.ath.cx/custom-partition.txt I have written a short script illustrating how it might work (http://mjj29.matthew.ath.cx/partition) which reads a file of that name and prints the commands that would be needed to do the setup. I'd like comments on this approach, I'm happy to write at least a basic version of this, although I may need some help with all the debconf magic. A few notes about what I have at the moment: - it always assumes you are layering in the order partitions < raid < encryption < lvm < filesystems. While I'm fairly happy with this being correct for partitions, raid, lvm, and filesystems; encryption could be an exception. - there's no progress/error handling - partitioning needs to be handled, preferably in a platform-independent way - I haven't looked at password input for encryption - obviously it should trigger installs of the correct FS/MD/LVM/crypt packages Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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