Ubuntu – Sol's blog

Preseeding Ubuntu 10.04

Jun 282011

In this post, I will walk through a simple preseed file that can be used to install a minimal Ubuntu machine in ~10 minutes (depending on the mirror used). The installer will only ask for the hostname. Everything else will be automated.

To get started, you will want to download the netboot ISO. You can get this from http://tinyurl.com/62qz9t7 or any other Ubuntu mirror. If all your machines are on the same network, it may make sense to setup gPXE. Details on that will be covered in a later post.

In order to use the preseed file outlined below, you will need to boot with the following appended options (press TAB at the installer screen). Note that the debugging variables are only necessary if you are having trouble.

DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 locale=en_US.UTF-8 console-setup/layoutcode=us url=http://www.siriad.com/preseed/preseed.cfg

The first thing we will do is configure the networking settings necessary to automate the install.

##############
# Networking
##############

# Uncomment and fill in these in order to preseed the hostname question
#d-i netcfg/get_hostname string unassigned-hostname
#d-i netcfg/get_domain string unassigned-domain
d-i netcfg/choose_interface select eth0
d-i mirror/http/proxy string

I am pointing to the default US Ubuntu archive. You should change this to suit your setup.

########################
# Installation Sources
########################

d-i mirror/country string US
d-i mirror/http/mirror string us.archive.ubuntu.com
d-i mirror/http/directory string /ubuntu/

Here, I am using the default partitioning scheme and wiping any existing partitions. You may need to change this if you want custom partitions.

#################################
# Disk Partitioning/Boot loader
#################################

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/sda
#d-i partman-auto/method string lvm
d-i partman-auto/method string regular
d-i partman-auto/purge_lvm_from_device boolean true

# And the same goes for the confirmation to write the lvm partitions.
#d-i partman-lvm/confirm boolean true

# You can choose from any of the predefined partitioning recipes.
# Note: this must be preseeded with a localized (translated) value.
#d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe \
#       select All files in one partition (recommended for new users)
#d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe \
#       select Separate /home partition
#d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe \
#       select Separate /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions

# This makes partman automatically partition without confirmation.
d-i partman/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/choose_partition select finish
d-i partman/confirm boolean true

d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean true
d-i grub-installer/with_other_os boolean true
d-i grub-pc/install_devices multiselect /dev/sda

Once again, your localization settings will likely differ from these, so modify as needed.

#################
# Localizations
#################

# Keyboard localization
d-i console-keymaps-at/keymap select us
#d-i console-setup/variantcode string dvorak

# Timezone
d-i clock-setup/utc boolean true
d-i time/zone string America/Chicago

d-i apt-setup/backports boolean true
d-i apt-setup/contrib boolean true
d-i apt-setup/multiverse boolean true
d-i apt-setup/non-free boolean true
d-i apt-setup/proposed boolean true
d-i apt-setup/universe boolean true

I usually don’t setup a default user when I install servers. These settings just create a root user (with login capabilities) having the password ‘r00tme’. You will not want to use this preseed file unmodified if your machine is connected directly to the internet. You can also configure preseed with a crypted root password, but I still recommend changing it once the install is complete.

#################
# User Creation
#################

d-i passwd/root-login boolean true
d-i passwd/make-user boolean false
d-i passwd/root-password password r00tme
d-i passwd/root-password-again password r00tme
d-i user-setup/allow-password-weak boolean true
d-i user-setup/password-weak boolean true

Setup Bcfg2 to do the post-install business (will be covered in a later post).

#######################
# Software Selections
#######################

tasksel tasksel/first multiselect
d-i pkgsel/include string openvpn vim
pkgsel pkgsel/include/install-recommends boolean false

# don't try and do automatic updates; that's bcfg2's job
d-i pkgsel/update-policy select none

d-i finish-install/reboot_in_progress note

d-i preseed/late_command string \
        in-target wget http://www.siriad.com/preseed/postinst.sh -O /root/postinst.sh; \
        in-target /bin/bash /root/postinst.sh

Installing Request Tracker on Ubuntu with nginx

Linux, Nginx, Ubuntu No Responses »

Apr 222011

I recently spent quite a bit of time installing and configuring request tracker to run on Ubuntu 10.04 using nginx as the web server. The documentation on doing this was scarce (or incorrect), so I thought this would be a good place to centralize all the information needed to replicate my setup.

The first thing to do is install all the required packages. I assume you already know how to do this. For what it’s worth, I’m using a PPA repository for the nginx package since the one available in Ubuntu is extremely out of date. Here are the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx.list.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/stable/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/stable/ubuntu lucid main

I have apt configured such that it doesn’t install Recommended or Suggested packages. Therefore, I had to manually install the libcgi-fast-perl package because this will be necessary in order for nginx to run the RT code.

I then had to install the mysql-server package and create the database to be used.

root@rt:~# mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 584
Server version: 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.10 (Ubuntu)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> create database rtdb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> grant all privileges on rtdb.* to 'rt'@'localhost' identified by 'SECRETPASSWORD';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Next, I had to modify /etc/request-tracker3.8/RT_SiteConfig.d/50-debconf to suit our custom environment. I also had to reconfigure /etc/request-tracker3.8/RT_SiteConfig.d/51-dbconfig-common to use mysql with the appropriate values for the database that was created.

# THE DATABASE:
# generated by dbconfig-common

# map from dbconfig-common database types to their names as known by RT
my %typemap = (
    mysql   => 'mysql',
    pgsql   => 'Pg',
    sqlite3 => 'SQLite',
);

Set($DatabaseType, $typemap{mysql} || "UNKNOWN");

Set($DatabaseHost, 'localhost');
Set($DatabasePort, '3306');

Set($DatabaseUser , 'rt');
Set($DatabasePassword , 'SECRETPASSWORD');

# SQLite needs a special case, since $DatabaseName must be a full pathname
#my $dbc_dbname = 'rtdb'; if ( "sqlite3" eq "sqlite3" ) { Set ($DatabaseName, '/var/lib/dbconfig-common/sqlite3/request-tracker3.8' . '/' . $dbc_dbname); } else { Set ($DatabaseName, $dbc_dbname); }
Set ($DatabaseName, 'rtdb');

By default, the RT install uses a simple sqlite database. We just switched it to use our mysql database that we created in the previous step. Once that is complete, you need to update the SiteConfig by running update-rt-siteconfig. Then you can move on to configuring nginx.

Here is the nginx configuration that was necessary to get all aspects (as far as I’ve tested) working with RT:

server {
        listen          [::]:80;
        server_name     rt.siriad.com;
        root            /usr/share/request-tracker3.8/html;

        location / {
                index           index.html;
                fastcgi_pass    unix:/var/run/rt/rt.sock;
                include         /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_script_name;
        }

        location ~* .+\.(html|js|css)$  {
                index           index.html;
                fastcgi_pass    unix:/var/run/rt/rt.sock;
                include         /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_script_name;
        }

        location /NoAuth/images/ {
                alias /usr/share/request-tracker3.8/html/NoAuth/images/;
        }
}

Here is the upstart script located at /etc/init/rt-fcgi.conf:

# rt-fcgi - test
start on runlevel [12345]
stop on runlevel [0]
respawn

env FCGI_SOCKET_PATH=/var/run/rt/rt.sock

exec su www-data -c "/usr/share/request-tracker3.8/libexec/mason_handler.fcgi"

Once all those are in place, the only thing you need to do is service rt-fcgi start and restart nginx. Then you should be able to login using the default RT username/password.