Re: Is there a way to ssh into the debian installation process?

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

Thanks for responding, Scott!

On Dec 8, 2013, at 6:57 PM, Scott Ferguson <scott.ferguson.debian.user@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 09/12/13 13:26, Rick Thomas wrote:
>> 
>> Is there some way to tell the debian installer to enable an ssh
>> server during the installation?  
> 
> 
> Yes - at least with the i386 and AMD64 installs
> 
>> I'd like to be able to
>> ssh/slogin/scp to the installation process so I can retrieve log
>> files and otherwise snoop the process when the keyboard/mouse are
>> frozen.
>> 
>> This is part of my pursuit of Bug#728936, which renders it impossible
>> to do a normal Sid CD-based installation of my PowerPC Macs, because
>> the USB keyboard and mouse are not recognized.
> 
> Perhaps not in that sense:-
> ;you need to select ssh at beginning of the installation process (e.g.
> in the graphical setup choose Advanced --> “Continue installation
> remotely using SSH”)
> ;I have no experience or knowledge of the PowerPC installer.

The PowerPC install CD has a very minimal boot loader.  Nothing like the flexibility that comes with grub on the x86/amd64 architecture.  But, presumably, all the grub fancy stuff finally boils down to something that gets added to the boot command line and passed on to the loaded kernel/initrd.

I have complete control of the keyboard up to, and including, adding parameters to the boot command line.  But that's really all the flexibility I have (short of some kind of pre-seeding -- which I have no experience with, but would love to learn about!)

After the CD boots, the keyboard is not usable.

So the question is, 

Is there something I can do at the level of the boot command line that will pass to the installer a request to run an ssh server?

Thanks!
Rick

PS:  Is there a wiki page that tells about how to add pre-seeding to an otherwise normal installation from CD?  I haven't searched (I will!) but if anybody has a pointer it might save me some time…  Thanks!