Bug#492790: debian-installer: lvm+raid+cryptfs blues

[Jeff Smith <drebian@dodgit.com>]

Package: debian-installer
Version: lenny beta 2
Severity: normal

I have used lenny beta 2 d-i several times (not particularly with the system from
which I am sending this report, so please ignore sys info below). 

All systems were x86 - in all cases I was looking to get two physical disks
mdadm mirrored, with a /boot primary partition, and one or more partitions
(sometimes logical, sometimes primary) running lvm on top of crypt. 

The process was not straightforward, and I made the following notes:

1). If d-i finds a nic, it attempts to DHCP even when I do not wish to use the 
    network. Even when I do not have the cable plugged in, in fact.

2). If raid is already set up on the devices from a previous attempt, the 
    assemblable devices are not shown until raid is configured, even though there
    is nothing presented to configure, as all the partitions are already part of
    a logical disk.

3). I was never able to get swap onto encrypted to work, either as an lvm or a
    dedicated partition. 

4). I also could not see anyway to use /dev/random as the
    key-file for swap, rather than hard-wiring a key-phrase.

5). I was never able to boot my crypted system without manually adding the
    cryptopts=source=/dev/md1,target=md1_crypt,lvm=vg0-root 
    parameters to the grub menu.lst file.

6). I was not able to set /boot up prior to the lvm crypt part. (Obviously 
    all the config for /boot can be done long before the lvm and crypt partitions are
    configured). Any attempt to set /boot up and then continue to do config lvm
    and crypt for the root partition causes the partitioner to forget that
    the boot partition is allocated to /boot. (If I set up configure
    the boot partition at the same time as all the other partitions that have
    required lvm and crypt, then it will work: only swap will fail).

I don't have access to the dilab to demo the above using small partitions, but
I have been through the process on enough of my own boxes to believe it is 
easily replicable. I have used both GUI and text versions of the installer. 

Jeff

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-M51-D370
Locale: LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15)