Virtual appliance 1st run configuration

[Nico de Haer <nico.dehaer@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm working on a Debian based system in vmWare ESX. All is going great and I find myself at the point that I would like to create a real virtual appliance.

Ideally, at 1st boot the following shoud happen:
1) boot with network disabled to prevent any conflicts (this is how the appliance is shipped out)
2) At the end of the boot process a script located in in /etc/init.d checks if this appliance has been configured. If this is not the case, present the user with the option to (re)configure the hostname, network, timezone, root password and so on.

All of the things that need reconfiguring are normally done during install and I was wondering if it is possible to leverage the work already done by the debian-installer team for this task.

Regards,

Nico