[10:41] <cjwatson> grr, everybody who asked questions that I can answer has left
[10:41] <cjwatson> thom: setting mirror/suite to anything but the current release is unlikely to work in Ubuntu
[10:42] <cjwatson> there are no compatibility shims or anything and I've put no effort into keeping that working; the edgy installer for instance requires tasksel in main and customised for Ubuntu, which it wasn't in dapper
[10:45] <thom> ah, ok
[02:39] <cr3> I'm trying to use preseeding to erase the entire disk but it seems that I need to specify the whole string: Erase entire disk: SCSI5 (0,0,0) (sda) - 80.0 GB ATA ST380811AS
[02:39] <cr3> is there a way to specify a more generic string so that the same preseed file can be used across several machines?
[02:54] <cr3> weird, preseeded install took a fraction of the time to install compared to the kickstart install. trying again, just to make sure
[06:41] <cjwatson> cr3: don't preseed that question - see the installation guide which describes how to preseed partman-auto more correctly
[06:41] <cjwatson> specifically partman-auto/disk
[06:45] <cr3> cjwatson: I had tried that but it seems that the installer always prompts unless partman-auto/init_automatically_partition is defined
[06:45] <cr3> cjwatson: give me a sec, I could make sure
[06:47] <cjwatson> what release is this?
[06:48] <cr3> cjwatson: edgy
[06:49] <cjwatson> then just preseeding partman-auto/disk is definitely sufficient. make sure you've set it to the right value though (i.e. one of the device names in the output of parted_devices)
[06:49] <cr3> cjwatson: if this is indeed a bug rather than a misconfiguration on my part, I could file a bug on malone and test it on dapper and feisty afterwards
[06:49] <cjwatson> (in feisty, you need to preseed partman-auto/method to regular as well)
[06:49] <cjwatson> I don't see a bug yet
[06:50] <cjwatson> if you can reproduce it with DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 and are sure the preseed file is correct, a bug report on partman-auto with the installer syslog and a copy of the preseed file would be good
[06:51] <cjwatson> (DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 on the kernel command line; that produces a trace of all the installer's debconf interaction in the syslog. very handy)
[06:53] <cr3> cjwatson: thanks, specifying /dev/sda worked! I had tried the default value, /dev/discs/disc0/disc, without double checking that it actually existed.
[06:55] <cr3> that seemed to be the only part which prevented me from using preseeding, so I'm currently installing herd 1 with kickstart but I'll revert that to preseeding this afternoon.
[06:56] <cjwatson> where was that listed as the default?
[06:56] <cjwatson> /dev/discs is obsolete in edgy
[06:56] <cjwatson> (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/no-more-devfs)
[07:00] <cr3> cjwatson: I must've been looking at dapper documentation, I'm netinstalling that release as well :(
[07:02] <cjwatson> ah yes, quite important to use the right release's documentation for preseeding
[07:03] <cr3> just diff'ing the very useful example files would've probably given me a quick indication
[11:38] <mark> lol
[11:39] <mark> I had made it so that in early_command the debug logs webserver is started during every install
[11:39] <mark> so I was just reinstalling a squid server, turns out our load balancer pooled it during the install because the web server was up
[11:40] <mark> and probably returning 200 OK for anything