On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 15:15 -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > Phil Blundell wrote: > > You're right that a preseed file would also allow me to set the mirror > > location during install, but that would be slightly more cumbersome from > > my point of view. I don't really want to get into building customised > > CD images, so in order to make it "just work" without manual > > intervention there would need to be a way for clients to automatically > > locate the preseed file on the server, which I think would again come > > down to a DHCP option. > > I've wanted for a while a way to let dhcp servers broadcast a preseed > file (either content or url). If you can point me at a way to make a > dhcp server do that and show me what it looks like to a dhcp client, > then the rest of the peices should be very easy to put together.
Sorry about taking so long to reply to this. I guess there are a couple of ways to make this work. One possibility would just be to have the installer try to retrieve the preseed file from a fixed location on the "next-server" specified in the DHCP lease, using tftp and/or http. So, if you wrote "next-server 192.168.106.1" in your dhcpd.conf, the installer might try http://192.168.106.1/d-i/preseed.txt" or something. That'd be easy to set up, and probably powerful enough for most folks. It'd probably help if the clients had 'send vendor-class-identifier "Debian";' or something similar in their dhclient.conf files, in case the server needed to provide different next-server values to d-i and other clients. A slightly more complex approach would be to put this in the dhcp config file: option space debian; option debian.preseed-file code 1 = text; class "debian" { match if option vendor-class-identifier = "Debian"; vendor-option-space debian; option debian.preseed-file "http://server/preseed.txt"; } That way, you could specify a complete arbitrary URL for the installer to retrieve, at the cost of rather more configuration at the server end. I think the URL ought to show up as $new_preseed_file in the dhclient-script's environment; you'd probably want the script to write this out to some other file from where the installer proper could pick it up. I guess the two mechanisms aren't exclusive: you could have the clients use the "debian.preseed-file" option if the server sends it, and otherwise try the next-server thing. p. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]