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Debian Powered Hosts Yet Simple, Version 2 (dphys2)

Simple Automated Installer (SAI) for Debian 3.0 (woody)

Project Basics
Project Status
Code Download
Auxillary documents
External Stuff (Links)

Project Basics

This project is aimed at creating an installer for (re-)installing our over 100 Debian Linux systems with Debian 3.0 (woody) without having to baby-sit the official interactive installer for an hours time for each machine.

The aim is to be able to simply insert the rescue and an modified root disk, answer a minimal amount of questions and then walk away, while the machine does its install by itsself.

For this most of the information asked for by the official installer should be pre-entered while generating an modified root disk.

Second target is automated maintenance of the machines, automatically installing/upgrading and removing packages, controlled by an single file, containing an package status list.

This program requires an network to run, as it will fetch all floppies (appart from the first 2) and all packages from the network. It can use either static IP configuration, or fetch config from DHCP. The floppy images can also be fetched from the net via PXE, avoiding any removable media.

Intended parts in this project are:

This installer is based on reverse-engineering the existing one, mainly by going through the entire source code of the dbootstrap program, as given in the bootfloppies (local copy) source package, and the scripts called by base-config and noting all the actual actions done while installing with the options we used in an test installation.

For more info on this project read the README file.
For some questions people have asked or may ask read the FAQ list.

Project Status

For the full details of done/doing/todo of the project best read the Logfile. A short excerpt from it is here:

Done are:

Milestone 1 (2002.12.18), aim for automated install of an basic Debian system: Milestone 2 (2003.04.17), aim for automated install of all packages and configs we want: Milestone 3 (2003.08.04), get system up to production use, add whatever shows itsself to be needed to use the program for our job: Milestone 4 (2004.02.19), implement swap files and custom kernels: Milestone 5 (2004.10.15), CD and PXE boot, scp uploads, separate dphys-admin and dphys-pkgtools and dphys-swapfile, run in file system: Current (= development, = may be broken):

Todo are:

Code Download

Current (= development, = may be broken): Milestone 5 (2004.10.15): Milestone 4 (2004.02.19): Milestone 3 (2003.08.04): Milestone 2 (2003.04.17): Milestone 1 (2002.12.18):

Auxillary documents

These are files I made while investigating various aspects of our existing System and the Debian 3.0 install process.

Text documents from planning:

Saved test installations: Saved test installation debconf databases:

External Stuff (Links)

Various links that may be usefull:
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This page is by Neil Franklin, last modification 2004.11.25