Creating my own Preseeded ISO with partman replaced by a ZFS step
Hello,
I'm looking to preseed an installer for a cluster, but I'd like all machines to
boot from ZFS roots. [The best recommendation I've found][1] wants me to boot a
LiveCD, install ZFS, setup the zpool, and the `chroot` in and repeat the
installation manually. This seems really tedious and error-prone, and somewhat
defeats the purpose of the preseeded installer.
I'd like to somehow modify the installer ISO that I create when preseeding to
include ZFS (so that before the package manager is configured, a ZFS pool can
be created), replace the partman step with some custom scripting that [creates
a zpool and sets up the datasets][2], and finally install zfs-dkms (also
zfsutils-linux and zfs-initramfs).
Looking at [an example stretch preseed file][3] (and I must confess, a friend
who is capable of scrolling to the end of a file found this--why
partman/early_command is at the end and not with the other partman stuff is
beyond me!), it seems like if I was able to add the compiled ZFS kernel module
and utils to initrd (along with my preseed file), I could run my zpool stuff
from partman/early_command. However, I'd still need a way to skip the default
partman stuff so that it couldn't overwrite all my work and somehow inform the
rest of the install process to use my ZFS root.
I also came across [partman-zfs][4], but apparently this is only for a FreeBSD
port. Could that be useful in any way?
In digging through mail archives, I also came across [this script][5], but it's
unclear to me how exactly that would fit into my desired workflow. This sounds
like you'd need to manually drop to a shell to install/setup ZFS.
Is there a sane way to go about adding ZFS root support to my preseeded install
or should I abandon this and wait for better support? If the latter, are there
steps I could take to add better support given my limited knowledge of d-i?
Thanks,
Bailey Parker
[1]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Debian-Stretch-Root-on-ZFS
[2]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Debian-Stretch-Root-on-ZFS#step-3-system-installation
[3]: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/example-preseed.txt
[4]: https://packages.debian.org/sid/partman-zfs
[5]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2018/01/msg00334.html
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