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Bug#871569: marked as done (installation-reports: offline machine, install from ISO images -- use case feels neglected)

Your message dated Fri, 21 Aug 2020 04:58:02 +0200
with message-id <[🔎] 20200821045802.07acb7c9ded347064600db2d@mailbox.org>
and subject line Re: Mass-closing old installation-report bugs  ---  round 5
has caused the Debian Bug report #871569,
regarding installation-reports: offline machine, install from ISO images -- use case feels neglected
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact owner@bugs.debian.org
immediately.)


-- 
871569: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=871569
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
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>

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
Hi,

Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm closing the reports below.
> 
> That's installation-reports for Debian 7 with
> - undefined errors
> - problems which are likely to have been fixed in the meantime
> - successful installation
> 
> Because of the age, there is no chance to analyse them further and therefore
> they are no longer relevant or of any use for current releases:

And thank you for filing these installation bug reports, they have been very 
useful at the time they were filed!
If you know, that the issue you reported (and gets closed here) is still existing
in recent installation images, please file a new report for that!

round 5 (for Debian 7 / 8 / 9 / pre-buster ):

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=706219
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=739299
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741206
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742647
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=798896
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=799570
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=805342
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738865
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=790708
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=804154
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851429
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851432
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851539
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851740
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=852779
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=853187
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854087
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854428
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854455
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854857
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=856178
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=857048
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=857179
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=857695
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=857839
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=858139
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=858181
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=858299
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=859233
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=860286
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=860478
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=860809
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861015
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861083
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861380
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861469
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=862010
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=862025
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=862521
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863178
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863241
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863613
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864935
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864991
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=865473
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=865811
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866240
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866597
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866681
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866966
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=867064
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=867066
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=867285
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=868085
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=868338
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=868942
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=868994
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=869118
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=869895
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870331
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=871323
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=871569
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=872764
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=874314
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=874385
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=875788
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=876352
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=877467
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879514
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879659
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879688
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879987
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880021
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880054
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880104
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880947
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=882732
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=884348
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=885026
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886023
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886025
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886970
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=887670
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889673
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889717
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=889993
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890192
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890404
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=891973
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892405
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=893432
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=893748
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894059
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894169
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894231
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894270
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895700
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=897559
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=899251
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=899321
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900609
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900666
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900738
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=901851
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=903047
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=903244
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=904421
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=905827
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906093
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907575
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=909294
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=909918
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=910023
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915368
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=916068
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=916381
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=916386
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=917350
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=917940
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919842
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=921264
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=921861
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=922115
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=923252
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=923524
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=924179
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=924563
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=925537
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926111
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926448
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926538
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926975
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926980
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=927811
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=928192
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=928413
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=928414
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=928490
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=929243
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=929476
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931241
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931587
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931918
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=944285
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=944762




-- 
Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org>
PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508  3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076

--- End Message ---
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