Netbooting the live server installer

darkstar · May 20, 2020, 7:04pm

Thank you for the link.

kevincarson · May 25, 2020, 1:38am

I really liked being able to select for my installation Just enough OS (JeOS) at the start of the old d-i based method. I don’t want all these “standard” base items from Ubuntu; I want a partitioned disk, default networking working, sudo capable user, and SSH server. Everything else I want to be able to add. This makes a much better foundation for making all those streaming/containerized/golden/cloud images that are touted. The alternative is taking the base installation and working too hard to rip out extra.

It can’t be much burden to maintain a choice that does less.

flyboybigblue · June 2, 2020, 12:42am

I have a need within my organization to make Ubuntu 20.04 work within our existing environment (a Cobbler server running on Redhat). I cannot do this without a netboot image-the mininmal image won’t boot on raw hardware into an efi environment.

I’m a huge supporter of Ubuntu normally, but I find myself very disappointed when Canonical makes these kinds of decisions that remove features that were provided previously…

mwhudson · June 2, 2020, 10:15am

I’m not especially familiar with UEFI netboot, but it should be possible to boot the live server installer this way. Have you tried that?

It’s definitely something we need to document properly.

flyboybigblue · June 2, 2020, 6:23pm

Yes, Cobbler won’t properly import the Ubuntu Live image (it has to import the .iso image). My guess is that it’s expecting to serve up files where the Ubuntu Live image wants to hand out a url…I’ve got a separate question open to the cobbler user forum over this, but in the past, the answer with Ubuntu has always been “don’t use the live CD!”

mwhudson · June 2, 2020, 9:54pm

Ah, I’ve no experience with cobbler unfortunately.

birera · June 28, 2020, 3:40am

Providing the mini.iso for so long automatically implies that it was supported. As you can see in this thread that it was a very popular method (I myself am affected as I have been using it since 2010). Lets face it, the removal of it affects a lot of users and its overall a bad idea and Canonical needs to listen more to the communities requests. I am switching to debian for now.

adambarnett52 · June 29, 2020, 8:31am

Hi All,

I follwoed the OP and manged to PXE boot the liveCD, this is installing onto a Virtual Machine, but during the installer i get an error

'2020-06-26 12:09:31,765 ERROR root:39 finish: subiquity/InstallProgress/curtin_install: FAIL: Command '['systemd-cat', '--level-prefix=false', '--identifier=curtin_log.16470', '/snap/subiquity/1772/usr/bin/python3', '-m', 'curtin', '--showtrace', '-c', '/var/log/installer/subiquity-curtin-install.conf', 'install']' returned non-zero exit status 3.
2020-06-26 12:09:31,765 ERROR subiquitycore.controller.installprogress:134 curtin_error
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/snap/subiquity/1772/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/controllers/installprogress.py", line 307, in install
    await self.curtin_install(context)
  File "/snap/subiquity/1772/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/controllers/installprogress.py", line 91, in decorated
    await meth(self, subcontext, *args)
  File "/snap/subiquity/1772/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquity/controllers/installprogress.py", line 287, in curtin_install
    self.logged_command(curtin_cmd), check=True)
  File "/snap/subiquity/1772/lib/python3.6/site-packages/subiquitycore/utils.py", line 85, in arun_command
    raise subprocess.CalledProcessError(proc.returncode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['systemd-cat', '--level-prefix=false', '--identifier=curtin_log.16470', '/snap/subiquity/1772/usr/bin/python3', '-m', 'curtin', '--showtrace', '-c', '/var/log/installer/subiquity-curtin-install.conf', 'install']' returned non-zero exit status 3.
2020-06-26 12:09:31,766 INFO subiquity.core:438 saving crash report 'install failed crashed with CalledProcessError' to /var/crash/1593173371.766197443.install_fail.crash

has anyone got this or have any suggestions

zippy.zebu · June 29, 2020, 7:24pm

Hi,

I have several question

The mini.iso doesn’t work for focal at the moment since there is a kernel update in the repo and the mini.iso didn’t get updated. Please provide an update for the iso.
Why would it be dropped? We just want to build our custom iso for our remix, desktop amd64 image, on top of netboot install. That’s what is recommended in the wiki. We don’t want server iso since it is over 800 MB and netboot iso is just 70MB. It doesn’t make sense to use server.iso for desktop remix in the first place. So my question is
Does Ubuntu discourages people building custom remix iso on top of Ubuntu ? If so why ?
My second question brings the third point. AFAIK mini.iso is created simply executing a script, getting kernel, generating inirtd, compressing file system and all that. Is it possible to generate the iso on my local system ? Actually I don’t even need the iso, only tar.gz so that I can boot directly boot it from hard-disk.

I found several old guide based on debian but not a single one on Ubuntu. Can you provide a small guide for Ubuntu?

If it is feasible may be community can take it over and continue providing mini.iso.

Thanks.

vorlon · June 29, 2020, 9:51pm

Where in the Ubuntu wiki do you find this recommendation?

It certainly doesn’t, but neither does the mini.iso, so I’d like to know where this is written and fix it since that is not a method that I’m aware has ever been endorsed by the Ubuntu development team.

We do not discourage this, but there are other methods for doing this customization. LiveCDCustomization - Community Help Wiki

It is built as part of the debian-installer package build. The debian-installer package is not going to be supported by the Ubuntu archive in groovy and forward.

mwhudson · July 3, 2020, 3:43am

The error you posted tells us no more than that the install failed unfortunately. Can you post more of the output?

brownjl · July 4, 2020, 2:26pm

Is there a trick to making PXE boot with the liveCD work when served from http(s) server? It doesn’t appear the build of wget used doesn’t support https…

mwhudson · July 5, 2020, 10:28pm

Hi, welcome to the forum. https support was added to focal after release so it won’t work with the release ISO but should work with those from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/focal/daily-live/current/. I admit I haven’t tried it though, so please let us know if it doesn’t work!

hypothetical-lemon · July 23, 2020, 10:15pm

Do you know if pxe booting works with the autoinstall option? I keep getting brought back to the menu selection.

Also where is cloud-init pulling the user-data and meta-data files from? Is there a default somewhere that I missed?

thanks.

alowther · July 24, 2020, 3:34pm

If you are installing onto a UEFI machine, you may be running into an issue where curtin changes the boot order during the install so that PXE is first

The user-data and meta-data file location is specified in the command line to the kernel.

I created a full PXE example at https://askubuntu.com/questions/1235723/automated-20-04-server-installation-using-pxe-and-live-server-image

hypothetical-lemon · July 24, 2020, 4:40pm

I found the issue, it was a typo in my pxeconfig/default file. But thank you for the link it really helped yesterday.

smarsching · August 1, 2020, 5:09pm

We used Cobbler in the past, but we had a lot of issues with it because it makes a lot of assumptions about the structure of installers / images and is thus hard to adapt to new distributions.

For this reason, we developed our own replacement called “Vinegar” that you can find at https://github.com/KIT-IBPT/vinegar/ (just in case you are interested in alternatives to Cobbler).

arcticlight · August 23, 2020, 3:40pm

Hello @mwhudson I just wanted to mention that the download link listed here in this guide no longer works. I believe that the correct new location is http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/focal/daily-live/current/focal-live-server-amd64.iso (using Focal in the URL instead of just daily-live) - can the guide please be updated?

mwhudson · August 24, 2020, 2:41am

Ah good point, I’ve updated the URL to the release URL for 20.04.1.

mifritscher · September 16, 2020, 8:31pm

Point one: It is a very bad move to kill the netinstall right before a final Release - a RC is a Release Candidate! Or does this means nothing anymore - so no testing should be done befor the final release? So the complete beta/rc cycle can be scrubbed all together. I assume that this was a move to break any resistance, because you knew very well that this is a very wide-used approach

Point two: The subiquity installer is, sorry, plain bullshit. I tried it several times - it always refused my partition scheme, and it is very ugly to use on TUIs. I used the mini.iso even on local installs to avoid the shitty so called “modern” installers - because d-i yust works flawlessly, in opposite of the half-backed ubuntu-created ones.

Point three: A 800 MB download only to get to the installer - loading the whole iso in a ramdisk?! Are you kidding me?

Point four: The netinstall can indeed be used with UEFI fine - with the described fix, or over netboot

Point five: Not only netinstall gets borked, but also debmirror. 20.04 can’t be mirrored fo a complete local install as on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debmirror/+bug/1821251 . A system which I can’t install 100% without internet (incl. additional software from the repo) is utterly useless for me.

Point six: When get ubuntu healed from its “DIH” syndrom? I see absolutly zero advantage over the d-i installer. Only things which are caused from willful killing the d-i. The completely loughy point is that the “new shiny installer” can’t even do zfs (which can only be done by ubiquity). So there is not even code sharing between uniquity and subiquity!

If there is no classical netinstall when I do my next linux install class I’m forced to switch over to debian. Sorry, but I don’t have any other solution for me.