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Re: How to preseed install via pppoe (for A-DSL)?

From: Eddy PetriÈ™or <eddy.petrisor(at)gmail.com>
Date: Tue Nov 27 2007 - 19:01:31 EST

Josef Wolf wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 02:41:11PM +0200, Eddy PetriÈ™or wrote:

>> Josef Wolf wrote:

> [ ... ]

>> Did you try to manually retry the configuration?

>
> Thanks for your replies and your suggestions, Eddy!
>
> Yes, I tried "udpkg --configure --force-configure ppp-udeb". But the
> menus were messed up. Looks like menus are messed up by debug/log output
> to the terminal. Anyways, I entered pppoe-username/password blindly.
> But it failed again without error message.

ppp-udeb's postinst needs to be ran in an debconf environment. By "manually retry" I meant controlling manually the installation by going to the main-menu and selecting ppp-udeb's menu entry in the main menu.

>> For some unknown reason
>> ppp-udeb sometimes fails to consistently configure PPPoE. It had this
>> problem since its begining when I started working on it, but I never
>> found the reason behind it. Still, manually retrying usually makes it
>> work.

>
> Did not work for me. I have retried at least 10 times. :-(

Did you try a regular image without any preseeding? Maybe there's something that breaks ppp-udeb (I am just braindumping, I am not thinking of a specific cause).

>>> I have tried to further investigate the problem and found that
>>> ppp-udeb.postinst fails at line 168 which reads
>>>
>>>    db_input high netcfg/get_hostname
>> *If* your investigation is correct, apparently the hostname question is
>> botched/not asked somehow. Don't know why.

>
> It was not asked because it is preseeded with
>
> d-i netcfg/get_hostname string dsl-gw
>
> and it seems to be recognized by d-i, because it is stored with
>
> Name: netcfg/get_hostname
> Template: netcfg/get_hostname
> Value: dsl-gw
> Owners: d-i, netcfg
> Flags: seen
> Variables:
> Id = netcfg/get_hostname
>
> in /var/lib/cdebconf/questions.dat
>
> But I am _not_ asked for the domainname. Maybe this is the cause of the
> problem? Please check my other mail about this at
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2007/11/msg00734.html

I don't know, I am not skilled at all when it comes to preseeding.

Becasue of this possible interference with preseeding I asked you to try a vanilla image and see if you can configure PPPoE with such an image.

>>> The next interesting point is that eth0 is not configured at the time
>>> ppp-udeb runs.  Seems like ppp-udeb is configured before netcfg.  Could
>> This is normal and that is the whole point. To make ppp-udeb configure the
>> networking instead of netcfg.

>
> OK.
>
> Eddy, can you please give me some hints how to could track down this
> problem? I must confess that I am not very familiar with d-i internals.
> But I am familiar with linux command line in general. So just a few
> hints might be enough to get me into a position to track down this
> problem.

There is the possiblity to set the debugging level of debconf to DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 (in debconf-devel the value is a string, but in D-I is a number) by passing DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 to the kernel command line. The syslog should be more verbose this time.

Also note that the debconf protocol is *very* sensitive to spilled out strings or messages and any extra/unpredicted output from commands inside the postinst might break debconf and you get weird strings/dialogs/failures.

This is a good sign that something is still writing to stdout (which is debconf's stdin and which should have a specific format respecting the debconf protocol).

-- 
Regards,
EddyP
=============================================
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein

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Received on Tue Nov 27 23:18:07 2007

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