A debian-installer is available on a host where a virtual machine is network booted on it. It uses the gallifrey instead of the official. An attempt to apt-get install pf-xivo revealed missing packages that were added to the repository. The meta package pf-xivo was successfully installed.
Methodology
Assuming a host running Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze, the general idea is to boot a virtual machine that
will auto-install using debian-installer so that it uses a specific class that will pull packages from the gallifrey repository created with packaging-farm.
Virtual machine
The libvirt virtual machine is given 512MB RAM, 8GB RAW disk image, 1CPU.
The configuration of libvirt is made to accept VNC connections from anywhere to gain access to
the console over the network:
diff --git a/libvirt/qemu.conf b/libvirt/qemu.conf index dc8eb83..282e734 100644 --- a/libvirt/qemu.conf +++ b/libvirt/qemu.conf @@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ # NB, strong recommendation to enable TLS + x509 certificate # verification when allowing public access # -# vnc_listen = "0.0.0.0" +vnc_listen = "0.0.0.0" # Enable use of TLS encryption on the VNC server. This requires
dhcpd and network boot
The dhcp server is instructed to allow for network boot in /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf
subnet 10.10.70.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 10.10.70.70 10.10.70.100;
filename "pxelinux";
next-server 10.10.70.254;
option domain-name "farm";
option domain-name-servers 10.10.70.254;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option broadcast-address 10.10.70.255;
option routers 10.10.70.254;
}
The TFTP server is installed:
apt-get install tftpd-hpa
The kernel and pxelinux configuration files are copied from a i386 lenny directory into /var/lib/tftp/. Actually a more elaborated variation rsync’ed from a machine on the avencall lan named kenny.avencall.com but this is not strictly necessary for the test: fai-linux-lenny below is equivalent to linux and fai-initrd-lenny is equivalent to initrd.
The libvirt configuration of the virtual machine
is instructed to boot from the network:
<os>
<type arch='i686' machine='pc-0.12'>hvm</type>
<boot dev='network'/>
<boot dev='cdrom'/>
<boot dev='hd'/>
<bootmenu enable='no'/>
When the virtual machine is started with
virsh start skaro.xivo.vm.test
it will show the following and be ready to boot from the network.
A new entry has been added to the menu displayed:
label xivo_gallifrey_farm
menu label gallifrey-farm
kernel fai-linux-lenny
append initrd=fai-initrd-lenny rw auto=true url=http://66.254.41.119 priority=critical locale=en_US.UTF-8 interface=auto netcfg/dhcp_timeout=60 classes=debug,xivo-gallifrey-farm hostname=xivo --
in the file /var/lib/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/xivo_devel/xivo_devel.cfg that has been
extracted with
cd /var/lib/tftp git clone git://git.proformatique.com/official/debian-pxelinux.git pxelinux.cfg
and contains all the menu for all the XiVO configurations.
Other packages
The debian-installer script starts by installing a package whose sole purpose is to add files in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ so that packages are extracted from the . The sources of the package are in the packages/branches/official/lenny/pf-fai/ directory of the internal rcs.lan.proformatique.com/rcs/svn/common-softwares repository. They can also be retrieved from the package sources at
deb-src http://dak.proformatique.com/debian lenny main
with the command
apt-get source pf-fai
Installation
All the common files are in the lenny directory, for
instance the preseed.cfg and installer.cfg that sets the passwords and other package values.
d-i passwd/root-password-crypted password $1$NHxfkWun$PMGLFNFtPKwIFT532sinD1
That should be replaced with a known password, for instance:
d-i passwd/root-password password foobar
otherwise it will be impossible to login.
The installation asks for the disk partition. If it fails,
the error logs can be found at /var/log/pf-fai/postinst.log
The key of the packaging-farm repository is added
to late_script
if [ -x /usr/bin/apt-key ]; then
apt-get -y install gnupg
wget http://gallifrey.dachary.org/gallifrey.gpg -O - | apt-key add -
fi
It also removes any repository added by late_script_target and replace them with the packaging-farm repository:
deb http://gallifrey.dachary.org/packaging-farm/gallifrey/gnulinux/debian gallifrey-lenny main
If a script (such as late_script) fails, the error message can be found after login on the machine in the /var/log/installer/syslog file.
gallifrey distribution
The gallifrey distribution has been updated to include the misdn-user package that was missing from the list although it was already created. The pf-asterisk-module-xivo, pf-asterisk-res-sqlite2, pf-asterisk-ami-aoriginate, asterisk-chan-sccp, pf-asterisk-app-fax, pf-asterisk-app-nv-faxdetect packages were imported into the farm from the official repository and added to the list of packages necessary to install gallifrey.