Package: netcfg Severity: normal The support for preseeding the hostname and domain name is very broken in netcfg. The debconf questions netcfg/get_hostname and netcfg/get_domain are badly named (should be netcfg/hostname and netcfg/domain). netcfg sets these to values that it finds in dns or dhcp with no regard to any existing preseeded value, so you can't override the dns or dhcp with preseeding, which should be possible for installing on a broken network. The installation manual puts the best face it can on netcfg's behavior with this: # Any hostname and domain names assigned from dhcp take precedence over # values set here. However, setting the values still prevents the questions # from being shown, even if values come from dhcp. d-i netcfg/get_hostname string unassigned-hostname d-i netcfg/get_domain string unassigned-domain I think that netcfg's use of these variables needs to be rewritten, to make it a) take care to not trample over existing settings b) if there is no existing value, use dhcp/dns to get a good default c) if the user enters something wrong or goes back, unset the value to avoid a) above preventing b) from working when the question is asked again Since it would change the behavior of the two questions to do this, and require preseeding changes, this would be a good chance to rename them too. -- see shy jo
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