Public bug reported:
I'm trying to perform a fully automated installation of Ubuntu server on
100 Dell C8220s, by PXE booting the installer ISO then feeding it a
preseed file over http using kernel cmdline params including (among
others) url=http://myserver/path/ubuntu.preseed DEBCONF_DEBUG=5
I'm unable to defeat certain prompts; it appears as if the preseed
values are simply being ignored. This is a showstopper to Ubuntu
deployment at scale; we cannot tolerate any interactivity whatsoever
with 100 servers. When (if) this works, it will expand to even more
servers.
I've been banging my head against this for some time now, so I can
supply a wide variety of preseed files that don't work, but which I
think should work. I'll attach the more interesting ones to this report
shortly.
1. Ubuntu release: Precise, using ubuntu-12.04.3-alternate-amd64.iso
2. Package version: whichever version of {debian,ubuntu}-installer or
kickseed is included with the above ISO.
3. What I expect to happen:
3.1. Preseed directives shall either work, or fail in a debuggable way
Preseed configuration directives generated by debconf-get-selections
--installer > file, when this file is edited and fed back into the Ubuntu
installation, shall either:
3.1.a. Do what I want them to do; or
3.1.b. Output comprehensible diagnostics on tty4, explaining why they did not
work.
For example, if I have the wrong owner name (not eg 'd-i'), the wrong
directive name, the wrong type, or a unavailable value, tty4 shall show
a diagnostic explaining which of these is the case.
3.2. The selections output by debconf-get-selections --installer shall
reflect the choices I made in an interactive installation, to enable me
to reproduce a previous manual installation.
4. What actually happens
4.1. In many (but not all) cases, preseed directives neither work, nor
output any explanation as to why they did not work that is visible to
me. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places - is tty4 not the right
place?
4.2. debconf-get-selections --installer outputs great loads of stuff,
which bears only a vague relation to choices I made during manual
install.
For example, the output contains:
# Choices: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon,
Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Congo\, The Democratic
Republic of the, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon,
Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi,
Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao
Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan,
Swaziland, Tanzania\, United Republic of, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Western
Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe
d-i localechooser/countrylist/Africa select
This is pointless; it won't defeat any interactive prompting, as it's missing a
value. So there's no point including it in the output. It's just noise.
Also, I already told the installer I'm in Oceania, so I was never prompted for
a country in Africa. This directive thus has nothing to do with what I choe in
the interactive install.
On the other hand, the output also contains:
partman-lvm partman-lvm/vgcreate_parts multiselect
It appears to have forgotten that I selected /dev/sda1 as the sole LVM PV
during the interactive install - the value is missing.
Again, without the value, this directive doesn't do anything useful.
I could accept this type of output if I had said 'debconf-get-selections
--installer --all', ie asking for a sort of preseed template containing
every possible directive. But I didn't (one can't).
I currently think that rather than using a preseed file, it would be
easier to make my own initrd which executes
cfdisk/pvcreate/vgcreate/lvcreate/mkfs/mkswap/mount/debootstrap the way
I want. That's pretty sad - it's easier to write one's own installer
than to figure out how to configure the existing installer.
** Affects: kickseed (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1276064
Title:
Installer silently ignores preseed directives
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