Re: Use of Debian Installer to create cloud images.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 06:40:56PM -0400, Sam Hartman a écrit :
> what does the user experience look like for me as an image creator.
> Compare it to running debootstrap, vmdebootstrap or bootstrap-vz.
> I'm honestly curious.  I would have thought making an image with d-i
> would have been rather heavy-weight and unweildy to run.  I'd never
> given it serious thought, but would be happy to do so if you advocate
> for it.

Hi Sam and everybody,

I made a few progresses towards a proof of principle.  People interested in
tinkering by themselves are very welcome to have a look at and edit the
following wiki page.

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

In brief, a Debian Jessie instance is booted, and through a script passed to
cloud-init it downloads Debian-Installer on an EBS volume that is then
registered as an image.  This D-I image can be booted with a preseed file to
install Debian on another EBS volume, which can then be registered as an image.

Currently, the preseed file is work in progress, but at least it allows to open
a network-console and continue the installation by hand.

I did not have much time to test the resulting Debian image, and I do not
expect to have time in the next few days.  At least it boots, but then the
console output is quickly lost.  Perhaps it is just a matter of correcting the
kernel parameters about console output in grub.cfg...

Altogether, things are much easier with HVM than with paravirtualisation (which
was the state of the art when I lost momentum a few years ago).  I hope that
with a bit of trial-and-error I can get a nice example.  At least I need to
adjust the preseed file to enable Stable backports and install cloud-init.
Then, I will replicate the Debian-Installer images in all Amazon regions, for
those who find it interesting.

PS: currently the preseed file installs a desktop system; I did not yet find time
to correct that.

Have a nice day,

Charles

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