My friend Andrew came over yesterday and helped me set up dhcp/dns/kickstart on a spare machine because it would help me out for testing karmic and after 2 years I basically have no idea how to sysadmin anything. Here are the basic instructions.

I have a squid proxy at home that I use to cache my .deb files (See this great post for more information) so that I am not constantly hammering my local mirror with my 6+ machines in the household. Last cycle I was getting frustrated at how long it took me to do testing, so I vowed to make it all efficient so I can do real hardware and VM installs easily. Plus you know sometimes we have dinner parties and whatnot and it’s polite to offer Ubuntu to your guests. So after we set up kickstart I wanted the installer to use my squid proxy so that I could take advantage of all the caching goodness. That’s when I discovered that one can use preseed arguments in your kickstart file and it Just Works(tm):

preseed mirror/http/proxy string http://chichi:3128/
preseed popularity-contest popularity-contest/participate boolean true
preseed finish-install/reboot_in_progress note
#NTP
preseed clock-setup/ntp boolean true
preseed clock-setup/ntp-server string ntp.ubuntu.com
#One big partition
preseed partman-auto/choose_recipe select atomic
#Add local repo

# Tasks
preseed tasksel tasksel/ubuntu-desktop

# Packages
%packages
banshee
gnome-do
openoffice.org
ubuntu-restricted-extras
… etc…

I didn’t know you could do this!! Now I can get my preseed goodness and not have to relearn a whole new system. (Right now some of you are going omg use d-i, FAI, or one of the other million ways to do this). I prefer ks for two reasons, a) everyone I know uses it in production, and b) I can rip off other people’s ks scripts since they seem to be more common. This (and other) features have probably been around for a while, I need to spend more time hanging out with installer people.

Help needed: For some reason the karmic installer installs ubuntu-desktop, and the package gets installed, but none of the dependencies do. So after the install I get a semi-complete ubuntu desktop. After removing ubuntu-desktop and then reinstalling it /then/ it goes and grabs firefox, tomboy, and the rest of the desktop. I’ve tried the preseed line you see above and mentioning ubuntu-desktop explicitly in the %packages section to no avail. It doesn’t feel like a bug as much as I think I missed a step myself. On a positive note, installing ubuntu-restricted-extras is automated, I don’t get bothered for licenses or any of that, so woo hoo on that front.

Other random thing: Why not run a local ubuntu mirror? I set up an rsync and everything and started with main, then I realized that throughout the course of a cycle I am constantly updating and installing stuff, so it’s already in my squid cache, why have rsync firing off hitting my mirror when I keep most of the .debs locally anyway? Sure if I was at a University or something a full mirror would make more sense.

Related story on LWN about package repository proxies. I still find the squid method to be the most reliable for me, though hopefully apt-zeroconf will make this transparent and easy for normal people. (The caching part, not the kickstarting part.)

What ways are you sysadmins out there deploying Ubuntu? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.

stuff

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July 22, 2009

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