[debian-lan-devel] No internet connection after converting minimal installation

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hello,
My coworker and I are currently evaluating DebianLAN as a platform for 
our departmental high-performance cluster. I first wanted to go through 
a setup with all default settings and then begin modifying the 
configuration from there, but I am having trouble with this first step. 
I am trying to convert a minimal Jessie installation to DebianLAN.

Starting from https://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN/bootstrap, I'm referred 
to directions at 
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/debian-lan.git;a=blob;f=debian/README.Debian 
, which currently reads as follows for the conversion procedure:

47 Converting a minimal Debian installation
48 ----------------------------------------
49
50 Install a minimal Debian (only the core system) on the server.  Choose
51 'mainserver' as hostname.  Prepare appropriate partitions, examples
52 are available in /usr/share/debian-lan-config/fai/config/disk_config/.
53
54 Then convert the installation with the following commands:
55
56    apt-get install aptitude  # needed for FAI
57    aptitude install debian-lan-config  # might be already installed
58    aptitude -R install fai-server dialog  # no recommends needed
59    mkdir /srv/fai/
60    cp -r /usr/share/debian-lan-config/fai/config /srv/fai/
61
62 Adapt the config space to your needs if necessary and run FAI with the
63 variable CONVERT set to true:
64
65    export CONVERT=true ; fai -vN -s file:///srv/fai/config/ softupdate

I used the Debian installer Beta 2 netinstall amd64 to install Jessie. I 
installed a minimal system by deselecting all items from tasksel. The 
whole system is in one partition (I also tried separating /srv and 
/var), but I don't think this is my problem. During installation, I 
configured eth1 as the public network interface via DHCP and used 
mainserver and intern as the hostname and domain for the machine. The 
internet connection is completely fine at this point.

When I run the fai softupdate command (after running the previous steps 
listed in the directions), I choose the combined mainserver/gateway 
option and the process completes with some seemingly minor errors. After 
this, I have no internet access. ifconfig shows that eth1 is working and 
has a good ip address, but I am unable to successfully run apt-get 
update, for example. The problem persists upon restarting the machine. 
After the softupdate, /etc/network/interfaces has for eth1:

allow-hotplug eth1
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

which looks good to me.

I have tried several times with minor variations on what I described, 
but I can't get past this problem. Am I doing something wrong? There is 
a short fai error log from the softupdate, but I don't have a way of 
getting it off the machine right now and nothing on it looked serious to 
me (but I could be wrong). The problem is easily reproducible, but I 
will try to find a flash drive to get the log and post it here.

I'd really appreciate your help. Thanks and regards,

Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui
System Administrator, Biological & Medical Informatics Research Center
San Diego State University