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Accepted
Stefan Lasiewski
Asked: 2020-08-27 17:41:13 +0800 CST

Netbooting bare metal nodes, pass VLAN tag to the installer

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I need to install Ubuntu 18.04 onto some bare metal nodes. I'm using the normal Preseed + Debian Installer process.

We use VLANs and I cannot figure out how to configure the installation image to use this VLAN for the installer.

Here's how the process works:

  1. Configure the hardware NIC to use the VLAN tag (This is easy) via a firmware menu.
  2. The host gets a DHCP IP and is sent to the TFTP server.
  3. The TFTP server sends the installation image files to the host. The host receives it
  4. The host then loads the Ubuntu installation image.
  5. The installation proceeds

Steps 1-3 show that the host, network & VLAN are working.

At step #4, the installation image loads a new network configuration. However, it isn't adding a VLAN tag. It tries to get a DHCP address, but since it's not using a VLAN, the DHCP server never sees the request.

How can I pass on the VLAN tag to the installer? Is there a Kernel commandline that can be used with Ubuntu, as can be done with Fedora?

I'm very familiar with Kickstart on CentOS, but I'm fairly new to Preseed.

Ubuntu fixed this issue in Ubuntu 19.06, but I'm using 18.04.

system-installation networking pxe 18.04 vlan

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What I did was:

    1. Configure the system manually

    2. Configure the NIC manually

    3. Run the following command to figure out what options preseed/debian-installer used for netcfg. Many options are not documented.

    4. Append netcfg/... options to my Kernel command-line, as this example shows:

       LABEL linux
     KERNEL boot/ubuntu-mirror-linux
     APPEND initrd=boot/ubuntu-mirror-initrd.gz interface=auto url=http://mirrors.example.org/somefile.cfg ramdisk_size=10800 root=/dev/rd/0 rw auto ... ksdevice=bootif priority=medium netcfg/use_vlan=true netcfg/vlan_id=999
     IPAPPEND 2
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