I'm attempting to automate the installation of a Debian server (debian 6.0 squeeze 64bit).
Part of the installation requires the Sun JRE package to be installed.
This package has a licence agreement, which has to be accepted. I have a script which uses the following lines to accept and install the JRE:
echo "sun-java6-bin shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true" | debconf-set-selections
apt-get install -y sun-java6-jre
This works fine when executing the script locally. However, I need to execute the script remotely using the ssh command, e.g.:
ssh -i keyFile root@hostname './myScript'
This doesn't work.
In particular, it fails on apt-get install -y sun-java6-jre
. It would seem that in spite of me setting the licence agreement to accepted, when run remotely in this manner it is ignored.
Despite setting the value to true
, I still get prompted to manually accept the agreement when I run this command:
ssh -i keyFile root@hostname 'apt-get install -y sun-java6-jre'
I suspect it is something to do with environment that is taken care of when running a proper terminal session, but have no idea what to try next to fix it.
Edit 0: I have compared the output of env
when executed remotely via ssh
and when executed via a local terminal session. The only difference between the outputs is that the local terminal session has the additional value TERM=xterm
.
Edit 1: Setting the TERM
environment variable when calling my script, like this ssh -i keyFile root@hostname 'export TERM=xterm; ./myScript'
, produces the correct behaviour, but that's really only half an answer, as I don't know why you need to set it. An accepted answer for the person who can best explain the why!
(I've revised the question title as well, from "Remote Scripted Installation of Sun/Oracle JRE" to "Why does TERM=xterm have to be set for my script to work correctly when remotely executed?" as it's a more accurate question)
It's not boolean but select.
You can verify contents of debconf database :
As you can see on my machine it's already set to true because I manually accepted it during install. If I was to install sun-java6-jre again it would not prompt me to accept the license.
Let's set it to false :
Now let's check :
So Try :
Use debconf-show command to troubleshoot.
I suspect when you say
It's because you installed sun-java6-jre manually at some point.
The sun-java6-jre package contains
preinst
script that prompts for license agreement via/usr/share/debconf/confmodule
(also known as "shell script" interface to debconf frontend). The debconf implementation is very hard to follow but I'd guess that the implementation ofdb_input()
checks theTERM
environment variable and tries to implement different license agreement prompts for different terminals. See the debconf tutorial at http://www.fifi.org/doc/debconf-doc/tutorial.html. The idea is that debconf frontend may end up using braille display if the end user is vision impaired and the preinst script will just work.You're not supposed to pass scripted output to interactive debconf frontend as far as I can see it. It's meant for human consumption and may change at any time (according to environment variables, the moon phase and so on). You might want to google for
debconf frontend noninteractive
.Since the question has changed here is another answer.
TERM variable is checked as part of sun-java5-jre preinst script (see it here ) . Inside this script /usr/share/debconf/confmodule is used to interact with deconf database and to check whether the license has been set to accepted in the database or not. If not it will call debconf method to present the license to you. Debconf will present it in the way suitable for your environment. This is where TERM comes in. If you have no TERM it should fail over to other methods
So here is an example when license is set to false in debconf (not accepted)
And here is an example when the license has been approved (set to true in deconf)
Do you get the same "debconf" messages during install? You can see my experiments and successful installation of sun-java6-jre over SSH here NOTE : When running ssh root@localhost "env" I can't see TERM variable either.
If you want to see what the deb package is doing pre, during, post installation, donwload .deb file :
Extract .deb
Extract control.tar.gz and take a look at preinstal and other files. data.tar.gz is the content of the package.
This might not answer your question directly but hopefully will help.