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

[Andreas B. Mundt]

Hello Afif,

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 04:48:47PM -0800, Afif Elghraoui wrote:

> 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.

Can you ping this address from the external network or login with
ssh?  (Note that the firewall (shorewall) may restrict this (IIRC only
one ssh connection per minute).

> 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.

What happens if you connect a machine to the internal debian-lan
network, i.e. the other interface? It should get an ip-address from
the  10.0.0.0/8 network.

>From your description, I do not see anything that went wrong and all
sounds sensible.  Could  it be that the wrong interface is connected
to the outer world?  From your description above this should not be
the case.  If, however, that happened switch cables or modify
'/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules' (switch eth0 <-> eth1).

The replaced '/etc/network/interfaces' by debian-lan is then to blame.
Another problem could be either that there is no dhcp available in the
wide area network where eth1 connects to.  (Assign a fixed address in
that case.)

Finally, if all the above is not the case, your wide area network may
use the same addresses (10.0.0.0/8) as the debian-lan network.  Routing
will of course fail and you would need to modify the LAN address.

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

You are welcome!  Getting network access shouldn't be something that's
'impossible' to solve.  Please report any findings.

Best regards,

     Andi

--

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GPG key: 4096R/617B586D 2010-03-22 Andreas B. Mundt--<andreas.b.mundt at web.de>
                                   Andreas B. Mundt--<andi.mundt at web.de>

         938A 5CEE 1E29 0DE2 55D9  AC98 B01F EA84 617B 586D

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