Appendix B. Automating the installation using preseeding Additional options that may be of interest while attempting to automate an install while using DHCP are: interface=auto netcfg/dhcp_timeout=60 which makes the machine choose the first vi- able NIC and be more patient about getting a reply to its DHCP query. Tip: An extensive example of how to use this framework, including example scripts and classes, can be found on the website of its developer (http://hands.com/d-i/). The examples available there also show many other nice effects that can be achieved by creative use of preconfiguration. The following aliases can be useful when using (auto mode) preseeding. Note that these are sim- ply short aliases for question names, and you always need to specify a value as well: for example, auto=true or interface=eth0 . It’s also possible to use DHCP to specify a preconfiguration file to download from the network. DHCP allows specifying a filename. Normally this is a file to netboot, but if it appears to be an URL then installation media that support network preseeding will download the file from the URL and use it as a preconfiguration file. Here is an example of how to set it up in the dhcpd.conf for version 3 of the B.2.5. Using a DHCP server to specify preconfiguration files 89 B.2.4. Aliases useful with preseeding priority debconf/priority fb debian-installer/framebuffer language debian-installer/language country debian-installer/country locale debian-installer/locale theme debian-installer/theme auto auto-install/enable classes auto-install/classes file preseed/file url preseed/url domain netcfg/get_domain hostname netcfg/get_hostname interface netcfg/choose_interface protocol mirror/protocol suite mirror/suite modules anna/choose_modules recommends base-installer/install-recommends tasks tasksel:tasksel/first desktop tasksel:tasksel/desktop dmraid disk-detect/dmraid/enable keymap keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap preseed-md5 preseed/file/checksum