Re: How to preseed install via pppoe (for A-DSL)?

[Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 02:41:11PM +0200, Eddy Petrișor wrote:
> Josef Wolf wrote:
[ ... ]
> Did you try to manually retry the configuration?

Thanks for your replies and your suggestions, Eddy!

Yes, I tried "udpkg --configure --force-configure ppp-udeb".  But the
menus were messed up.  Looks like menus are messed up by debug/log output
to the terminal.  Anyways, I entered pppoe-username/password blindly.
But it failed again without error message.

> For some unknown reason
> ppp-udeb sometimes fails to consistently configure PPPoE. It had this
> problem since its begining when I started working on it, but I never
> found the reason behind it. Still, manually retrying usually makes it
> work.

Did not work for me.  I have retried at least 10 times. :-(

> > I have tried to further investigate the problem and found that
> > ppp-udeb.postinst fails at line 168 which reads
> > 
> >    db_input high netcfg/get_hostname
> 
> *If* your investigation is correct, apparently the hostname question is
> botched/not asked somehow. Don't know why.

It was not asked because it is preseeded with

  d-i netcfg/get_hostname    string dsl-gw

and it seems to be recognized by d-i, because it is stored with

  Name: netcfg/get_hostname
  Template: netcfg/get_hostname
  Value: dsl-gw
  Owners: d-i, netcfg
  Flags: seen
  Variables:
   Id = netcfg/get_hostname

in /var/lib/cdebconf/questions.dat

But I am _not_ asked for the domainname.  Maybe this is the cause of the
problem?  Please check my other mail about this at

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/11/msg00734.html

> > The next interesting point is that eth0 is not configured at the time
> > ppp-udeb runs.  Seems like ppp-udeb is configured before netcfg.  Could
> 
> This is normal and that is the whole point. To make ppp-udeb configure the
> networking instead of netcfg.

OK.

Eddy, can you please give me some hints how to could track down this
problem? I must confess that I am not very familiar with d-i internals.
But I am familiar with linux command line in general.  So just a few
hints might be enough to get me into a position to track down this
problem.

Thanks again, Eddy!