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Sean Whitton: consfigurator-live-build

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Debian

One of my goals for Consfigurator is to make it capable of installing Debian to my laptop, so that I can stop booting to GRML and manually partitioning and debootstrapping a basic system, only to then turn to configuration management to set everything else up. My configuration management should be able to handle the partitioning and debootstrapping, too.

The first stage was to make Consfigurator capable of debootstrapping a basic system, chrooting into it, and applying other arbitrary configuration, such as installing packages. That’s been in place for some weeks now. It’s sophisticated enough to avoid starting up newly installed services, but I still need to add some bind mounting.

Another significant piece is teaching Consfigurator how to partition block devices. That’s quite tricky to do in a sufficiently general way – I want to cleanly support various combinations of LUKS, LVM and regular partitions, including populating /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab. I have some ideas about how to do it, but it’ll probably take a few tries to get the abstractions right.

Let’s imagine that code is all in place, such that Consfigurator can be pointed at a block device and it will install a bootable Debian system to it. Then to install Debian to my laptop I’d just need to take my laptop’s disk drive out and plug it into another system, and run Consfigurator on that system, as root, pointed at the block device representing my laptop’s disk drive. For virtual machines, it would be easy to write code which loop-mounts an empty disk image, and then Consfigurator could be pointed at the loop-mounted block device, thereby making the disk image file bootable.

This is adequate for virtual machines, or small single-board computers with tiny storage devices (not that I actually use any of those, but I want Consfigurator to be able to make disk images for them!). But it’s not much good for my laptop. I casually referred to taking out my laptop’s disk drive and connecting it to another computer, but this would void my laptop’s warranty. And Consfigurator would not be able to update my laptop’s NVRAM, as is needed on UEFI systems.

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