Bug#871569: installation-reports: offline machine, install from ISO images -- use case feels neglected
Package: installation-reports
Severity: normal
Hello,
the idea was to install and use stretch on an offline machine. No
network access available or needed, now or in future, but all the
software in Debian at its disposal.
I decided that the best way to achieve this would be to obtain a full
set of ISO images, since there's signed official releases of those, dd
them to a bunch of USB drives and use them as if they were CDs. (Maybe
a partial mirror on an external HDD would have been the better
option?)
Issues:
1) The installer booted off and recognised the first "Bluray" just
fine, but at no point did it ask me if I had and wanted to add any
other discs. It didn't even point me to the possibility of adding some
via apt-cdrom. This was contrary to expectations, considering there's
a set.
Work around: add using apt-cdrom after installation has finished.
2) Neither the installer nor the system installed by it seem to have
any concept of ISO data being on something else than a physical disc
in an optical drive by default. After the first boot the first
"Bluray" wasn't found any longer by apt and friends, as the path to
the "optical drive" had changed.
Work around: change the /media/cdrom entry in /etc/fstab to use
/dev/disk/by-path/ and stick to one USB port, possibly tweak an
apt-cdrom option or two, I forget.
3) After having added all three images I ran aptitude update -- out of
habit but also because I'd gotten no indication that that wouldn't be
neccessary. That spewed messages about not having a [signed, I
presume?] Release file, "... can't be authenticated and is
therefore potentially dangerous to use". See also #807996.
Now that is *scary*, especially if you've done your homework and
verified the ISOs every which way.
I'm still not quite sure what's up with that, I've a hard time
believing that the official ISOs simply don't have signed release
files. According to Google that seems to have been the case in the
past, but with the recent push to deprecate unsigned repositories that
seems unlikly. In a way that ties back to item 2 -- chances are the
ISO is not on a physically immutable medium nowadays.
4) When installing stuff, aptitude will sometimes output a warning
about dpkg having completed fewer actions than expected. The
likelyhood seems to increase with the number of packages installed /
if the job spans multiple "discs". I'm not sure if it's actually
detrimental, but in a couple of cases I could've sworn I needed a few
tries to get everything to install.
5) Running MATE with default settings breaks this setup again, because
it'll automount the USB drive as soon as it's connected (ignoring the
mount point set for that in fstab ...). If you manually unmount it
using the GUI, it doesn't just unmount, it removes the drive from
existence, as far as Linux is concerned.
Work around: disable everything to do with automount.
Don't get me wrong, it works quite well now and it wasn't hard to
figure out, but I've been using Debian for close to twenty years
now. Someone newish might be stranded. And sure, the majority of
installs will have network access, but surely the official images' use
case isn't just "boot off it and possibly save a bit on bandwidth"?
(Somehow that reminds me of physical copies of Steam games ...)
It's possible that sets of fixed-size images aren't the right approach
for today, maybe a few boot images plus signed "mirror dumps" in
various sizes are the way to go, but in any case I believe that
(mostly) offline systems should still be supported as a first class
option.
Regards
Christian Pernegger
-- Package-specific info:
Boot method: ISO image dd'ed to USB flash drive
Image version: debian-9.1.0-amd64-BD-[123].iso
Date: End of July, 2017
Machine: 2016 netbook, Intel
Partitions: n/a
Base System Installation Checklist:
[O] = OK, [E] = Error (please elaborate below), [ ] = didn't try it
Initial boot: [O]
Detect network card: [ ]
Configure network: [O]*
Detect CD: [O]
Load installer modules: [O]
Clock/timezone setup: [O]
User/password setup: [O]
Detect hard drives: [O]
Partition hard drives: [~]**
Install base system: [O]
Install tasks: [O]
Install boot loader: [O]
Overall install: [~]***
Comments/Problems:
*) Having to configure network (in order to set hostname) on a system
with no NIC is a tad counter-intuitive.
**) TBH, using base 10 units for measuring any kind of
computer memory drives me up the wall. Why can't the installer's
partitioning tool support base 2 suffixes as well? Have you tried
creating two partitions that are exactly the same size with that
thing? Hint: it doesn't work.
Anyway, in previous versions I used to be able to do my partitioning
on the (other) console using fdisk, then use the installer as normal,
in stretch that confuses it no end. It would not format pre-existing
partitions nor give me an option to do so, not even if the partition
was zeroed. As a result it'd fail to mount the affected partitions
later. luks involved, but nothing else fancy.
Work around: Instruct the installer to zero the partition, abort that,
commit changes, have it fail on the next partition, rinse, repeat.]
***) see top of report for main points
--
Please make sure that the hardware-summary log file, and any other
installation logs that you think would be useful are attached to this
report. Please compress large files using gzip.
Once you have filled out this report, mail it to submit@bugs.debian.org.
<snip, because nothing in the report is hardware-specific and I'm
filing from a different machine anyway>
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