Installing Debian over the netboot and ssh network

Suitable for installing Debian Squeeze and later. The standard installer for debian is debian-installer (abbreviated di).

If it is impossible to get physical access to the console, this method is most convenient for installing a new Debian distribution. It is enough to turn on the server, wait for the download and join via ssh.
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Installation and Setup

Attention! Installation with the download of the configuration file preseed.cfg via http works on distributions starting with debian squeeze. Before that, it was required to rebuild the initrd image separately with the preseed.cfg file.

Debian squeeze will be used as the server. You will need to put dhcp3-server, tftpd, debian-installer, nginx on top of it:

aptitude install dhcp3-server tftpd debian-installer-netboot-i386 nginx 

Rule in /etc/inetd.conf line with tftp so that the root folder is "/ tftpboot":

 tftp dgram udp wait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.tftpd /tftpboot 

Configuration /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf:

 allow bootp; allow booting; subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { option routers 192.168.0.1; option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1; range 192.168.0.90 192.168.0.90; } host netinst { hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:6f:ee:ba; fixed-address 192.168.0.130; filename "pxelinux.0"; } 

The routers and domain-name-servers parameters are necessary so that the installer does not issue a warning about incorrect network configuration.
It is advisable to specify a fixed address so that you do not search for it in the dhcpd logs.

Copy the files you need to download:

 mkdir -p /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg cp /usr/lib/debian-installer/images/i386/text/{pxelinux.0,linux,initrd.gz} /tftpboot cat >/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default <<EOF default install label install kernel linux append auto=true priority=critical initrd=initrd.gz preseed/url=http://192.168.0.139/preseed.cfg EOF 

It remains only to prepare the configuration file preseed.cfg.

Configuration /var/www/preseed.cfg:

 di debian-installer/locale string en_US di console-keymaps-at/keymap select us di keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select us di anna/choose_modules string network-console di network-console/password password r00tme di network-console/password-again password r00tme 

Links

Materials that were used for writing. Although the most useful link was the last. I almost repeated the actions of the author.

General description: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/NetworkConsole
Descriptions of the preseed file: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/394
Official documentation of Appendix B. Automating the installation using preseeding
The most useful link is https://saz.sh/2011/07/30/preseed-debian-squeeze-using-pxe/