I’ll try to be useful here, not just critical. Though, critical will come first.
Issue here is that this new way is escalating quickly. We started with 800MB ISO image just a “few” releases ago, and still working netboot image. Now we’re at 1.7GB ISO with 22.10 and no netboot image at all, just a link that eventually leads back here. After following this for 2 years I don’t understand where Canonical is going with this.
Now, to be helpful as well, for those that don’t like having 4GB PCs becoming obsolete, there is a know workaround, and I don’t know why there’s no mention of it here. It’s booting contents of the ISO via nfsroot.
EDIT: to make it clear, I’m talking about extracting or mounting ISO on NFS server, then serve the contents itself, which goes around the requirement of keeping whole ISO in RAM plus additional RAM to do the booting and installation procedure. Example, on local server in your network:
mkdir -p /mnt/ubuntu-22.10-live-server-amd64-iso-nfs/
mount /var/www/html/ubuntu-22.10-live-server-amd64.iso /mnt/ubuntu-22.10-live-server-amd64-iso-nfs/
nano /etc/exports
/mnt/ubuntu-22.10-live-server-amd64-iso-nfs 10.10.1.1/24(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)
exportfs -a
systemctl restart nfs-kernel-server
I’ve been doing that with 20.04 and 20.10, and I tried that with 22.10 today and I get to installer, seeing subiquity lines and all. I tested with 2GB VM net-booting as well, and it gets to subiquity (didn’t bother to wait till end).
LABEL UbuntuServer-22.10-auto-nfs
MENU LABEL Ubuntu 22.10 Live Auto Installer from NFS
KERNEL http://10.10.1.1/ubuntu-server-22.10/vmlinuz
INITRD http://10.10.1.1/ubuntu-server-22.10/initrd
APPEND netboot=nfs ip=dhcp nfsroot=10.10.1.1:/mnt/ubuntu-22.10-live-server-amd64-iso-nfs autoinstall ds=nocloud-net;s=http://10.10.1.1/ubuntu-server-22.10/
Anyway, I’m still in process of doing what I actually plan, that’s booting custom squashfs with PXE, something I did with 20.04/20.10, I do wonder though if I’ll be able to do that with 22.10. But I’m starting to think that switching to another distro would be less demanding task.
Hope my comment helps at least someone, I’m sure it won’t change the Canonical path anyway.
Another edit: Doing this from NFS will still download ~1.7GB from NFS server unfortunately, so if you’re booting 100’s or 1000’s of PCs it will still strain your network and your NFS server.
