Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server Planning A New Means For Automated Installations

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server Planning A New Means For Automated Installations

Canonical's server team is working on a new means of carrying out automated installations of Ubuntu Server in time for their 20.04 LTS release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...r-Auto-Install

[anarki2]

Yay, we already had buggy and [email protected] kickstart and preseed support, how about having a THIRD buggy, [email protected] option? Because, you know, Canonical has a great track record when it comes to own baked projects. Like Bazaar, Mir, Upstart, Ubuntu Touch, Snappy (jesus...), MAAS... all a big mess. Canonical is a classic example of NIH syndrome. As in, "not invented here". Red Hat had kickstart, Debian had preseed, let's ditch both, and develop our own great stuff again!

partman-auto still is an abomination, if you ask me. Like why is it so friggin' difficult to let the user select the target disk, and ONLY the target disk, WITHOUT having to manually partition everything. The partitioning recipe is there, but disk detection is god awful, so you gotta go some fugly and unnecessary cat/grep/cut/head magic in early_command to ensure it goes on the proper disk.

For instance, sometimes it picks the USB drive as the install target instead of the SATA disk, then figures there's not enough free space for the recipe, then throws the towel in and asks you to partition on your own. If there's not enough free space for the recipe, why THE HELL did it pick that drive in the first place?? Especially when there's also a SATA disk with plenty space. And yeah, you could set it to pick the largest disk, except then you can't specify partitioning method Did I happen to mention that partman-auto completely ignores NVMe disks, too?

I actually went the extra mile to write up a nice fancy bash-only script to let the user pick via the command line, but guess what? You can't have interactive shells during partman-auto/early_command.

It just blows my mind. It's like someone designed this mess as 100% guaranteed to be annoying. Can't wait to have to deal with the new abomination.

BTW apt-mirror is unmaintained and debmirror has a bug which causes it not to mirror packages from the main/debian-installer UPDATES repo, causing preseeded installs to fail when any updated DI package needs to be downloaded during early install, like nic-firmware. I actually tried to report this, but after reading PAGES of how to actually report bugs in Debian/Ubuntu, only to face random failures with the built-in reporting tools, I just went "f*ck it".

Oh btw. there's another bug causing the Ubuntu apt client failing to fetch some repo files. To be more precise, it's looking for files on the mirror that shouldn't even be there in the first place. Like amd64 file lists on an arm64 mirror. The list goes on...

Sorry for the rant, but I've spent the better part of the last 3 months dealing with Ubuntu deployment, and all I can say is man, is it a buggy, horrible mess.

So again, congrats for both parties involved. I'm sure developing a 3rd installation automation method from scratch will reduce the number of such issues, and not increase them! Let the duplication of efforts begin again! All hail freedom of choice! /s

[starshipeleven]

Let the duplication of efforts begin again! All hail freedom of choice! /s

As opposed to closed source world where no wheel is reinvented ever... no wait.

Really, this is just Canonical being stupid, and Opensource can't fix stupid.

Meanwhile, in the land of the chameleon... AutoYast

[q2dg]

Kickstart is good and much more easy solution than pre-seed.
If they wanted to change from pre-seed, there was this solid technology ready to go.
Morons

[Vistaus]

Kickstart is good and much more easy solution than pre-seed.
If they wanted to change from pre-seed, there was this solid technology ready to go.
Morons

Wouldn't the Kickstart name get them in legal trouble? AFAIK the name 'Kickstart' is copyrighted to Hyperion Entertainment because it's a vital component of AmigaOS.

[brad0]

Opensource can't fix stupid.

Most of the time you can't fix the dysfunction with Open Source projects either.

[F.Ultra]

Wouldn't the Kickstart name get them in legal trouble? AFAIK the name 'Kickstart' is copyrighted to Hyperion because it's a vital component of AmigaOS.

You cannot copyright a name, they might hold a Trademark however but those are closely tied to what the function is of the trademarked name and if there can be any confusion by the public between the two. That is how you can have Apple Computers even though Apple Music existed beforehand (until Apple started to sell music of course, but that happened decades later).

Question really is if Hyperion even registered Kickstart as a Trademark to begin with since 4.0 does not use Kickstart anymore.

[starshipeleven]

Most of the time you can't fix the dysfunction with Open Source projects either.

You can fork them and/or keep your own downstream patched version, that's already more than you can do with closed source.

[espressobeanies]

I'd like to thank myself for making this a partial success: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...t/+bug/1801781

I guess the goal is to move Ubuntu completely over to Python3 thru the use of YAML files. I did enjoy Anaconda Kickstart while it was around.

[mifritscher]

They really killed preseed in exchange for their shitty new server installer (which was broken in many ways at least in 18.04, a so called LTS version)?! They had luck that the netinst variant (basically only kernel+initrd) still used the stable debian-based installer - else I killed Ubuntu in our process and switched to debian...

Whats wrong with the debian installer and preseed? They both are solid and stable tools. Typical DIH syndrome by Ubuntu I guess.