Re: Wheezy Debian-Installer images on the Amazon cloud.

[Anders Ingemann <anders@ingemann.de>]

On 27 October 2013 15:05, Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I made some progresses with the preparation of Amazon Machine Images with a
preseeded Debian-Installer, thanks to the option --root-device-name of
euca-register (and it API equivalent), which either I never noticed before or
is quite recent, and solved my problem of not being able to boot an image that
is not installed partitionless.

While I have not yet devised a preseed file that would fully automate the
process, the method is already useful when using the network console (via
password; for a reason I do not understand, my latest test with SSH keys did
not work).

Since Debian-Installer for Wheezy is not often updated, maintaining public
images of it is not much work.  I therefore went ahead and made one image per
Amazon region, using the debian account that James Bromberger kindly prepared
and uses to distribute Debian images.  For the moment, please consider these
images experimental; I might delete them if they have a strong defect.  But my
plan otherwise is to produce new ones each time the Stable installer is
updated, and keep them as long as Stable is supported.

The machine numbers and the explanation on how I created them are available on
our wiki.

    https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2DebianInstaller

I hope that you will find them useful !  For the moment, I only prepared amd64
images, but if you need i386 ones, please let me know, or create one yourself
following the instructions, it is really simple.

Have a nice day,

Charles

--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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> I made some progresses with the preparation of Amazon Machine Images with a preseeded Debian-Installer

Nice! I must try this some day.

> [..] solved my problem of not being able to boot an image that is not installed partitionless.

Not sure if you already have this link, but on http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UserProvidedKernels.html#AmazonKernelImageIDs you can get an overview of the different PV-grub AKI IDs (just FYI).

> [..] my latest test with SSH keys did not work

A little checklist:

* /var/log/auth.log is your friend :-)

* Check permissions, ownership of the authorized_keys file (and I *think* the .ssh directory as well)

* /etc/ssh/sshd_config needs to have PubKey auth enabled

> But my plan otherwise is to produce new ones each time the Stable installer is updated, and keep them as long as Stable is supported.

You know, there really is no reason for you to do this by hand.

My bootstrapper has a lot of library functions you can rely on to automate a lot of those steps (volume create, partitioning, pv-grub menu.lst generation, AMI registration...)

The way we create those images is quite different, but I see a lot of overlap in the basics.

Your script uses

> MIRROR=http://cloudfront.debian.net

I thought cloudfront was added to the http redirector (http.debian.net, meaning you can use that URL instead)? Or am I wrong?