Michael Reed wrote a nice tutorial for Linux User and Developer about unattended Ubuntu installations. Ubuntu aso has excellent documentation on the booting process.
Unattended installations are a boon to system administrators, or anyone who needs to install systems several times a month or so.
When an installation is preconfigured – especially using the network – an administrator can start the installation then go do something else. Productivity increases dramatically. If you have many systems to install – you can start all of them and leave them to finish on their own while you complete other tasks.
An unattended installation also leads into systems being identically configured, providing for easier administration and easier debugging. If systems are hand-crafted, then replicating the system (such as hardware upgrades or restores) will be harder – or more likely, impossible.
Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, the original preseed configuration tool is available; however, the excellent kickstart (and anaconda) program from Red Hat was adapted to Ubuntu. Preseed handles more options, but kickstart offers its own advantages as well. They can be used together for installations.
A whitepaper from Canonical (Automated Deployments of Ubuntu, by Nick Barcet in September 2008) describes in easy-to-read detail all the possibilities of unattended installations with preseed and kickstart. While the whitepaper discusses these things in context of Ubuntu 8.04, it is still a valuable resource in concert with the official Ubuntu install documentation.
The files required for booting from the network are available from Ubuntu mirrors; be sure to get the right one for your architecture and Ubuntu version (this discussion assumes ix86 and Ubuntu Lucid Lynx).
An abbreviated description of the process to set up for kickstart is this:
- Set up an HTTP server (web server).
- Set up a DHCP server.
- Set up a TFTP server.
- Set up a NFS server.
Once these three servers are up, you are more than half-way there. The kickstart file will be placed on the web server for the unattended installations.
Configure the DHCP server to use the pxelinux.0 file for the boot loader, and from the appropriate TFTP server. The boot files have to be located on the TFTP server in the appropriate locations.
Make sure, too, that all of the files necessary for installation – the entire distribution – is available via NFS or via the Internet. Once the boot loader is started, and the Linux kernel is loaded, all of the packages will be downloaded from this source.
Best thing to do is to test the autoinstalls on a virtual machine if possible, a scratch machine if not – and test until the installs are clean and unattended. Do this before your boss says you need to get that install done pronto!
Check the documentation for details; I’m currently setting up Lucid Lynx and will provide complete details later.
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