I am coming from debian-installer and now trying to setup an environment for generell installation of new Servers and VMs with Ubuntu 20.04 and seeing, that debian-installer (d-i) is deprecated and will not be supported any longer, I'd started to deal with autoinstall and cloud-init, but still have some struggle.
After installing a server and copying the install-file from /var/log/installer and adjusting it a litte, I can set up a very primitive system, but that still lacks the following things, that I can easyily do with d-i.
So what I have done so far is: Set up tftp with Apache2 so I can serve a PXE Image and cloud-init user-data.
cat /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default
DEFAULT vesamenu.c32
TIMEOUT 100
ONTIMEOUT local
PROMPT 0
NOESCAPE 1
LABEL local
MENU DEFAULT
MENU LABEL boot-from-local-disk
LOCALBOOT 0
LABEL focal-live-install
MENU label Install focal
KERNEL vmlinuz
INITRD initrd
APPEND root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=1500000 ip=dhcp url=http://172.16.16.41/tftp/ubuntu-20.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso
LABEL focal-live-install-autoinstall
MENU label Install focal - autoinstall
KERNEL vmlinuz
INITRD initrd
APPEND root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=1500000 ip=dhcp url=http://172.16.16.41/tftp/ubuntu-20.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso autoinstall ds=nocloud-net;s=http://172.16.16.41/tftp/cloud-init/
cat /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/tftp.conf
<Directory /srv/tftp>
Options +FollowSymLinks +Indexes
Require all granted
</Directory>
Alias /tftp /srv/tftp
cat /srv/tftp/cloud-init/user-data
#cloud-config
autoinstall:
apt:
geoip: true
preserve_sources_list: false
primary:
- arches: [amd64, i386]
uri: http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
- arches: [default]
uri: http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports
identity: {hostname: localhost, password: <>,
realname: ka_de_ae, username: ka_de_ae}
keyboard: {layout: de, toggle: null, variant: ''}
locale: en_GB
network:
ethernets:
enp3s0: {dhcp4: true}
version: 2
ssh:
allow-pw: true
authorized-keys: []
install-server: true
user-data:
disable_root: false
chpasswd:
root:<>
storage:
config:
- {ptable: gpt, path: /dev/sda, wipe: superblock-recursive, preserve: false, name: '', grub_device: true, type: disk, id: disk-sda}
- {device: disk-sda, size: 1048576, flag: bios_grub, number: 1, preserve: false,
grub_device: false, type: partition, id: partition-sda1}
- {device: disk-sda, size: 2147483648, wipe: superblock, flag: linux, number: 2,
preserve: false, grub_device: false, type: partition, id: partition-sda2}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: partition-sda2, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-0}
- {device: disk-sda, size: -1, wipe: superblock, flag: linux, number: 3,
preserve: false, grub_device: false, type: partition, id: partition-sda3}
- name: vg0
devices: [partition-sda3]
preserve: false
type: lvm_volgroup
id: lvm_volgroup-0
- {name: root, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 5368709120B, preserve: false, type: lvm_partition,
id: lvm_partition-0}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: lvm_partition-0, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-1}
- {device: format-1, path: /, type: mount, id: mount-1}
- {name: swap, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 4294967296B, preserve: false, type: lvm_partition,
id: lvm_partition-1}
- {fstype: swap, volume: lvm_partition-1, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-2}
- {device: format-2, path: '', type: mount, id: mount-2}
- {name: tmp, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 4294967296B, preserve: false, type: lvm_partition,
id: lvm_partition-2}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: lvm_partition-2, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-3}
- {device: format-3, path: /tmp, type: mount, id: mount-3}
- {name: usr, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 16106127360B, preserve: false, type: lvm_partition,
id: lvm_partition-3}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: lvm_partition-3, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-4}
- {device: format-4, path: /usr, type: mount, id: mount-4}
- {name: var, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 10737418240B, preserve: false, type: lvm_partition,
id: lvm_partition-4}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: lvm_partition-4, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-5}
- {device: format-5, path: /var, type: mount, id: mount-5}
- {name: varlog, volgroup: lvm_volgroup-0, size: 4294967296B, preserve: false,
type: lvm_partition, id: lvm_partition-5}
- {fstype: ext4, volume: lvm_partition-5, preserve: false, type: format, id: format-6}
- {device: format-6, path: /var/log, type: mount, id: mount-6}
- {device: format-0, path: /boot, type: mount, id: mount-0}
swap: {swap: 0}
version: 1
users:
- name: ka_de_ae
shell: /bin/bash
ssh-authorized-keys:
- ssh-rsa <key + comment>
- ssh-rsa <key + comment>
- ssh-rsa <key + comment>
- ssh-rsa <key + comment>
runcmd:
- sed -i -e '/^#PermitRootLogin/s/^.*$/PermitRootLogin yes/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
- restart ssh
This is already some steps ahead of the initial simple install, but there are a lot of things not working.
- hostname: I don't want to put a fixed hostname there, I'd like to get this filled in from DNS, like d-i did it. But if I leave this blank, the installer stops and I have to do it manually, which is not what I want to do. Using "localhost" as some suggest on the internet just sets it to localhost instead of using the DNS-name from the DNS server. How to achieve this?
- Getting the ssh-public keys to an authorized_keyfile doesn't work. I've tried several ways but still I don't get any user with any public keys attached.
- Getting root user to work with authorized_keys directly after install. Would be fine, but as long as we have an user with root-rights, we can go on from there with Ansible. But still would be nicer to have root working.
- Have others users after initial install other than the one in "identity" still doesn't work for me.
- network interfaces: the server I am testing on has 4 devices, just one of them currently has a link (enp3s0), but this will not always be the interface name and I still lack a way to just say the server "take the first one with a link, try DHCP on it and when this works, use it and ignore all other interfaces for now". Kind of missing eth0 here...
- Probably better to put that into an own thread, but in case it's just easy to answer: We also want an own mirror for the servers, so we have to download everything only once to a central mirror instead of every server doing it on itself. But using the mirror (just simple apt-mirror) doesn't work with cloud-init, because there seems to be missing some folders, that are needed for that.
I guess, from what I read, that most of these things should be quite doable, but I definitely miss something in doing it right, so any help is appreciated.
