Introduction We use Packer a lot, but I had not so far generated any Qemu images with it. This was a fun project because it allowed (or forced) me to learn autoinstall, Ubuntu's cloud-init style installation automation, which by the way easier to work with than Debian-style preseeds. For more information on preseeding for pre-20.04 […]
Ubuntu 18.04 AWS images - and probably other Cloud images as well - have automated upgrades turned on. This is done via two systemd timers, apt-daily.timer and apt-daily-upgrade.timer. The timers kick of periodically as well as when an instance is rebooted. This sounds reasonable until you are provisioning something: you're unable to install or configure […]
Over the years I've had to automate installation of Ubuntu and Debian installers a number of times. The primary motivation has always been to avoid all the questions about timezone, locale, partitioning and which packages to install and to not have to babysit the installation. In theory automating the installation is as simple as writing […]
