akester / custom-debian-iso

Custom Debian Image

This is an example of a custom, fully-automated Debian installation ISO. More details are on my blog post.

Building This ISO

This ISO file is pulled directly from the debian release mirror, and will pull the latest netinst image. This file is about 300MB, and will be downloaded each build if it doesn't exist.

To build, run ant as root:

sudo ant

Root permissions are needed as many of the files that are extracted from the ISO have root ownership. Otherwise, the cleanup commands would not work.

Upstream Reference

The procedure used here (along with the preseed file) is based on the examples in the Debian wiki:

• https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
• https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed/EditIso

Assumptions Made

This image is built with a couple of assumptions:

1. The default user password will be changed immediately. It's setup to be static, which is obviously very bad for any sort of production usage. The Storehouse installer will take care of changing this.
2. The installation is completely automated, and will overwrite the first hard drive the system sees (/dev/sda).
3. The image is not designed to be written to actual media like a CD or USB drive. It's sole purpose is to boot virtual machines. In Theory it can be written to a plain CD, but this has never been tested.