Now a month has passed since my last post and Ubuntu 18.04 is almost officially released. It’ll be out on April 26th, 2018. I went ahead and and started building a NetBoot ISO. I found a GitHub repository that contained what I needed. The script simply pulls the NetBoot ISO from a Ubuntu mirror of my choice, extracts it, injects my SSH keys, scripts, preseed file, and whatever else I decide to add. Once the build is prepped, it packs everything up into a nice little 58MB ISO file. From there, I boot the ISO which then promptly runs thru the preseed file and automatically does everything I configured it to do. Once installed and rebooted, I then log in as root with my SSH key assigned to putty or any SSH client, answer a couple questions from a script I put together from the original repository, it does some updating and reboots again. The end result is a system ready to do some whatever with no visible traces that such an install took place. 🙂

The only thing I have to do is answer two questions after it’s first reboot for the host name and domain name then re-login after the 2nd reboot as my chosen user name configured at ISO build time.

Now my ISOs and preseed files utilize a local APT Proxy on my network with the domain name “fileserver.sanlan” using the APT Cacher package. You can either set one up or rebuild the iso.

May readd the local proxy if I can add a trusted root to my images to access the proxy securely and have https repos work. Atm, I must disable the proxy any time a script adds it’s own secured repo to the install.

The other repository I linked in my other post about Server Automation for Linux produced full sized 839MB ISO. This one does everything I need it to do except it requires the Internet to work or mainly, a connection to the APT Proxy I have (was) configured on my local network with all the files preloaded.

Some fine tuning might be needed once Ubuntu 18.04 is officially released but as of today, it’s functional. The only scripts I modified from the original repository was build-iso.sh, preseed.cfg, and added init-host.sh. I deleted the files for 17.10 since I didn’t need or want them. I may carry my changes for 18.04 over to 16.04 for the heck of it. I edit both files at once.

You can’t say they didn’t get credit. 😛 They made the code, I simply modified it for myself. 😊

Enjoy my fellow nerds! 🖖

Update 2018/09/29: My scripts were updated to use a password file in the repository root with a plain text password (for now) and use the user running the script as the user for the image.

Commented out qemu support in the build-disk.sh scripts and add simple VirtualBox support. The script just creates the vbox file, registers it to the installed virtualbox instance, creates the disk image and ISO image then assigns them to the vbox file with a bridged nic.