Unattended Network Install - using preseed

[promodus]

My motivation to get rid of those questions is that I have a headless server, no vid card, no serial port.
Keep in mind that when using preseed, use only one space or tab between values.
I'm using 8.04 for this preseed file.

Prerequisite #1:
a network bootable method.
gPXE
DHCP + PXE Linux or PXE Grub + TFTP
(There are many other variations)

Prerequisite #2:
The ISO of which Ubuntu you wish to install.
and an HTTP Daemon such as Apache.
In my example, I'll have my webserver at the IP 192.168.1.200

Prep-work:
Download the network install kernel and initial ramdisk.


wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz

For my setup I am using PXE Linux. Configure pxe linux configuration to load Kernel and initrd appropriately.
Example of such can be found here:
http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default

next create a directory ubuntu in your WWW Root, in my example my WWW root is /var/www (by default)

mkdir /var/www/ubuntu

Next mount the installation iso to /var/www/ubuntu

mount -o loop ubuntu-8.04-server-i386.iso /var/www/ubuntu


Now to get rid of those installation questions:

1. [!!] Chose Language (2 screens, language then country)
Add the boot parameter:

debian-installer/locale=en_CA

2. [!] Ubuntu installer main menu: Detect keyboard layout?
Add the boot parameter:

console-setup/layoutcode=us

3. [!] Configure the network: Hostname
Add the boot parameter:

netcfg/get_hostname=your_hostname

4. [!] Choose a mirror of the Ubuntu Archive
Add the following line to your preseed.cfg

d-i mirror/country string CA

5. [!] Choose a mirror of the Ubuntu archive
Add the following line to your preseed.cfg
(you can remove step 4 as you need to manually input mirror info anyway)

d-i mirror/protocol string http
d-i mirror/country string manual
d-i mirror/http/hostname string 192.168.1.200
d-i mirror/http/directory string /ubuntu/
d-i mirror/suite string hardy
d-i mirror/http/proxy string http://proxydnsorip:port

If you're not using a proxy after the word string leave this empty.

6. The reason we are using the installation ISO rather than the ubuntu archives is that I kept getting this error:
[!!] Download installer components
Failed to load installer component
Loading kickseed-common failed for unknown reasons. Aborting.
Switching to the Ubuntu installation media had solved this problem.

7. Partitioning: (!!USE AT YOUR OWN RISK !! TEST BEFORE DEPLOYING !!)

d-i partman-auto/init_automatically_partition select Guided - use entire disk
d-i partman/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/confirm boolean true
d-i partman-auto/method string regular
d-i partman/choose_partition select Finish partitioning and write changes to disk

8. User account Creation

d-i passwd/user-fullname string Your Full Name
d-i passwd/username string loginname
# Normal user's password, either in clear text
d-i passwd/user-password password yourpassword
d-i passwd/user-password-again password yourpassword
# or encrypted using an MD5 hash.
#d-i passwd/user-password-crypted password [MD5 hash]

9. Package Selection:
I would highly recommend adding open-ssh server if this machine is headless.

tasksel tasksel/first select OpenSSH server

10.System clock set to UTC?

d-i clock-setup/utc boolean true

11. Log into the machine:

ssh your_ip_address_of_target_installation

There that should automate the entire server process.
When the system reboots I would edit your /etc/apt/sources.list
In my example I set it from my local intranet webserver to one of the ubuntu archives.

sed -i "s/192.168.1.200/ca.archive.ubuntu.com" /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade