So today I was tasked with creating an entire system that does ubuntu automated installations, the first hurdle was actually getting ubuntu automated deployment, unfortunately there was a lot of misguidance laying around the net on the best way to approach this, so this is my attempt… it worked and I think it does the job…

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# Howto unattended install ubuntu server LTS 10.4.2

# Written by Karl Kloppenborg

# For Crucial Paradigm and Public Parties.

# Copyright 2011 – ~ – Karl Kloppenborg

# notes, I am doing this on CENTOS5.5

# This tutorial is designed to show you how to make an automated unattended installation of 10.4.2 LTS server…

1) get a copy of the disk: ubuntu-10.04.2-server-i386.iso

I got mine from internode as we have peering with them!

wget http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.04/ubuntu-10.04.2-server-i386.iso

…store this in /root because that’s an awesome place.

2) Now we mount the disk to mnt

mount -o loop /root/ubuntu-10.04.2-server-i386.iso /mnt

3) Now we will configure the webserver

yum -y install httpd

default location of www is /var/www/html

4) so make a directory to serve this ubuntu stuff from:

mkdir /var/www/html/ubuntu

5) Now move everthing into the ubuntu directory, so from inside /mnt issue this:

cp -R * /var/www/html/ubuntu

This should buzz around for a while with flashy lights — this is to be expected.

now start httpd:

service httpd start

Now, assuming you’ve setup tftp and its verified working, do the following:

I have setup the following as my TFTP directory: /data/tftpboot/

6) Create the directory ubuntu inside this:

mkdir /data/tftpboot/ubuntu

7) now in the /mnt do the following:

cd install/netboot/

8) copy this contents to the tftp dir

cp -R  * /data/tftpboot/ubuntu

now assuming you have already configured DHCPD and its verified working you should dhcpd to the right pxelinux.0

9) edit dhcpd.conf in /etc/

make sure you add:

next-server 10.255.0.1;

filename “ubuntu/pxelinux.0”;

obviously adjust the configuration of next-server to suit your IP of tftpd location…. 😉

now restart dhcpd and verify you didn’t break config.

service dhcpd restart

10) now edit /data/tftpboot/ubuntu/pxelinux.cfg/default… delete what ever was in there and add:

default install

label install

menu label ^Install

menu default

kernel ubuntu-installer/i386/linux

append ramdisk_size=14984 locale=en_US console-setup/ask_detect=false  console-setup/layoutcode=us  netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 netcfg/get_hostname=testserver url=http://10.255.0.1/ubuntu-preseeds/preseed.cfg vga=normal initrd=ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz — quiet

Note that append should be entirely one line…

11) then make another directory called ubuntu-preseeds inside webRoot.

mkdir /var/www/html/ubuntu-preseeds

Now we create the preseed and save it to this directory as preseed.cfg

I will attach this paste bin for it: http://pastebin.com/k02VMT1v

Boot and enjoy 😉

Cheers,

Karl Kloppenborg.