Debian Preseed

Debian Preseed is a mean to completely automate the debian-installer steps. There are several ways to setup the debian installer “preseeding”. The one I choose is to edit the netboot ISO image in order to include my installer configuration.

The preseed.cfg creates a hands off installation with the following features:

• Swiss keyboard and locale
• GPT partioning
• No swap
• Sudo without password for users in the sudo group

Feel free to adapt to your needs!

To rebuild the ISO images, make sure you’ve Docker installed and type:

make

This will download the debian installer ISO image, modify it and provide 2 ISO:

• debian-preseed-server.iso -> the available disk space is assigned mostly to /var
• debian-preseed-standard.iso -> the available disk space is assigned mostly to /

To use the ISO:

sudo dd if=debian-preseed-server.iso of=<put the device matching the USB key you just plugged>

Testing the iso locally

To test the iso, first make sure you have KVM / Qemu and a vncviewer installed. You can then run:

• make test_iso in one terminal: this will start QEMU in background and wait for the full installation to finish by connecting with SSH inside the resulting installation
• vncviewer localhost:59000 to see the process in action

Ansible

Ansible is the ultimate IT automation tool. test_ansible.sh fetches the roles using ansible-galaxy. Then, it calls ansible-playbook on the freshly installed debian image.

As a demonstration, the following roles are applied (see demo.yml):

• ansible_debian : configure non-free, install firmwares and configure locales
• ansible_debian/roles/users : configure the user accounts
• ansible_debian/roles/docker : install docker
• ansible_debian/roles/docker_portainer : deploy Portainer to easily manage the containers locally
• ansible_debian/roles/groups : Add users to groups

This is just an example how easy it is to deploy fully automatically a debian system.

Have fun!