I've been struggling to fully setup some machines with A2SDi-8C-HLN4F motherboards and Intel x553 NICs (which require recent ixgbe support) as Debian stable machines.
Thanks to considerable help from this list, I've been able to successfully setup the machines over the net using buster/testing netinstall images, which allow one to select stretch/stable at install time, then reboot into rescue mode on the netinstaller and install kernel-image-4.19.0-0.bpo from backports to provide a stable system and kernel with ixgbe support. However this doesn't work when running root off a RAID1 array with dm_crypt on top. Rescue mode can't both reassemble the array and decrypt the volume. While I can do that from the rescue shell I don't know how to pivot to make the decrypted volume root so I can install the backport kernel. ** Consequently I'd be grateful to know if: * it is possible to somehow install the backport kernel and dependencies during the netinstall process (apt-get install doesn't seem available on the virtual terminals) * alternatively, what mount point and commands should I use to make a root file system (which I've re-raided and decrypted) available to the buster installer in rescue mode Thanks very much Rory ** there is another issue, which is the stretch grub doesn't seem to be able to decrypt a dm_crypt volume when made from buster. I've reported that to debian-boot.
