how to pxe boot and preseed puppet-agent install in ubuntu from puppetlabs repo

[Peter K]

In my googling I did not find a simple recipe for how to install and run puppet for the first time (for a pxe / tftpboot / ubuntu / preseed / puppetlabs-repo scenario).

Here's what I tagged onto the bottom on my preseed.cfg script:

d-i preseed/late_command string in-target wget -O /home/<username>/puppetlabs-release-pc1-xenial.deb http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-pc1-xenial.deb;\

        in-target /usr/bin/dpkg -i /home/<username>/puppetlabs-release-pc1-xenial.deb;\

        in-target /usr/bin/apt-get update;\

        in-target /usr/bin/apt-get install -y --allow-unauthenticated puppet-agent;

        #in-target /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/puppet resource service puppet ensure=running enable=true; # this line wan't necessary because puppet joined the server and ran for the first time on first boot with no other configuration...if you have autosigning set up.

# This script assumes you have autosigning turned on by putting a single asterisk in this file on the puppet server: /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/autosign.conf

Here's my pxelinux.cfg/default snipit (how the preseed.cfg is called):

 LABEL ubuntu-16.04.2 server LTS with preseed

 MENU LABEL ubuntu-16.04.2 server LTS with preseed

 KERNEL images/ubuntu-16.04.2-server-amd64.iso/linux

 APPEND initrd=images/ubuntu-16.04.2-server-amd64.iso/initrd.gz inst.repo=ftp://<ip address>/pub/ubuntu-16.04.2-server-amd64.iso auto=true priority=critical debian-installer/locale=en_US keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us ubiquity/reboot=true languagechooser/language-name=English countrychooser/shortlist=US localechooser/supported-locales=en_US.UTF-8 boot=casper automatic-ubiquity quiet splash noprompt noshell preseed/url=ftp://<ip address>/pub/kickstarter/preseed.cfg ---

# and ftp://<ip address>/pub/ubuntu-16.04.2-server-amd64.iso is a mountpoint to the file of the same name.

# Make sure and change the <username> and <ip address> fields with your own.

[Thomas Hager]

Hi Peter,

ever thought about trying Cobbler?

In our environment, we PXE boot servers with Cobbler, install Xenial
with a recent Puppet agent and automatically sign the certificate on
the master for freshly deployed servers. Everything out of the box :)

Hth,
Tom.

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[Peter K]

Thanks for the suggestion, Tom.

I was working with a pre-existing environment but setting up cobbler is something I'll try next.

-peter