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  • Testing CD preseed oops: regression

    From Charles Curley@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jul 29 00:20:01 2024
    I have the latest testing netinst (20240722-03:17), and would like to
    install it on a virtual machine. I have a preseed file on a USB stick.
    As this is a virtual machine, the virtual hard drive is at vda, and the
    USB stick shows up at sda.

    When I go to load the debconf file, the installer doesn't find it. I
    then go to a console and manually mount the USB stick on /media. I can
    then ls the stick, more the preseed file, etc. When I then go back to
    the installer, it still cannot find the preseed file, and the USB stick
    has been unmounted.

    This has worked in the past.

    I boot from the help screen with the command line:

    expert auto file=/media/preseed.cfg

    I notice that the error message indicates that the installer failed to
    process "file:///media/preseed.cfg" (note the three slashes).

    --
    Does anybody read signatures any more?

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  • From Pascal Hambourg@21:1/5 to Charles Curley on Mon Jul 29 09:40:01 2024
    On 28/07/2024 at 23:50, Charles Curley wrote:

    When I go to load the debconf file, the installer doesn't find it. I
    then go to a console and manually mount the USB stick on /media. I can
    then ls the stick, more the preseed file, etc. When I then go back to
    the installer, it still cannot find the preseed file, and the USB stick
    has been unmounted.

    /media being unmounted suggests that the relevant code in debian-installer-utils/fetch-url-methods/file was run.

    This has worked in the past.

    With the same preseed.cfg file ?

    I boot from the help screen with the command line:

    expert auto file=/media/preseed.cfg

    I notice that the error message indicates that the installer failed to process "file:///media/preseed.cfg" (note the three slashes).

    "file://" is the URL scheme and "/media/preseed.cfg" is the pathname.

    AFAICS if the file was not found, the message would say "the file could
    not be retrieved", not "the installer failed to process the file" which suggests the file may be corrupted.

    Did you check the installer logs in tty4 or /var/log/syslog ?

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  • From Pascal Hambourg@21:1/5 to Charles Curley on Mon Jul 29 21:10:02 2024
    On 29/07/2024 at 20:28, Charles Curley wrote:
    Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> wrote:

    AFAICS if the file was not found, the message would say "the file
    could not be retrieved", not "the installer failed to process the
    file" which suggests the file may be corrupted.

    Did you check the installer logs in tty4 or /var/log/syslog ?

    That helped! Thank you. The preseed parser has its own log, which
    showed a syntax error on my part.

    Good to know that it was not a regression caused by the recent change in fetch-url-methods/file [1].

    [1] <https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer-utils/-/commit/08ba32825821b1999cbdefe09f290be21ba8fd69>

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