I'm trying to use the Buster generic image (https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/cloud/buster/20191117-80/debian-10-generic-amd64-20191117-80.qcow2) to automate deployment of KVM-based VMs. The reason that I'm not using the genericcloud or OpenStack image is that I'm passing through network VFs that require "hardware" drivers not included in the other images.
However, I'm running into multiple problems staging a system through cloud-init. Without the packages - bridge-utils - vlan - gnupg2 it is virtually impossible to use the image for cloud-init based deployment: While cloud-init can also install missing packages, the install would happen *after* package installation and network setup. bridge-utils and vlan are required if the network setup has either a vlan or a bridge and gnupg2 is required to add 3rd party repos (otherwise "apt-key add" won't work). Both - network access and 3rd party repos - may be required for further steps of an deployment (i.e. to install automation tools like salt, chef or puppet). So it would be great if the above mentioned packages could be included at least in the generic build (not sure if this is also a typical requirement for the other images). Also, the file "/etc/network/interfaces" is using an include line that will *not* process the cloud-init generated "/etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init.cfg": source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d Instead, sth like: source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*.cfg would be needed to process cloud-init generated network config - or - the cloud-init generated network config should not have the ".cfg" suffix. Best regards, Christian
