Node setup

Nodes are configured during installation from the customized Debian ISO. See Installing from a Bonded Internet ISO via USB disk or CD for more information on using these custom ISOs. The node setup page offers links to customized ISOs and offers options for generating the customized ISOs.

Changing the settings does not change the values on already-installed nodes; it only changes the initial settings for nodes that are installed with ISO files downloaded after the settings are changed.

After changing any of these values, you need to download a new version of the ISO.

Root password

The password of the node’s root user account.

Timezone

The node’s timezone.

DNS servers

Specify one, two, or three DNS servers used during the provisioning process.

Network interface names

Specify which interface naming scheme will be used for nodes provisioned with this ISO.

There are 2 options:

Predictable network interface naming

Generally used as the naming scheme for interfaces on modern Linux distributions, these interface names are called predictable as they are based off of hardware information such as which PCI device they are attached to.

These interface names tend to look like ens3, enp37s0, or enp42s0f1.

Legacy network interface naming

Sometimes referred to as “persistent interface names”, these names are determined when the network card is first detected and the network interfaces will be renamed to be consistent between boots of the system.

These interface names tend to look like eth0, eth1, or eth2

These interfaces can start to have issues when many interfaces are present, especially from things like USB devices. You may end up seeing interfaces named like rename0 instead of the intended name. As the default behaviour is predictable network interface names and there are problems with these interface names, predictable interface names should be preferred when possible.

Custom configuration

Note

This option only applies to the Debian 8 ISO, which is not recommended to use as that release has reached the end of its upstream support.

Additional Debian “preseed” configurations.

Preseed is the term Debian uses for supplying configuration options to the installer. Refer to the Debian preseed documentation for more details.

For example, to specify a custom keyboard configuration, you could put the following in the Custom configuration field:

d-i keymap select us

Preseed files

On Debian, the method of providing configuration data to the operating system installer is known as preseeding. This section lists three Debian preseed files with differing amounts of initial configuration data, mostly corresponding to the Installation configuration profiles.

Apt source

On Debian, packages are downloaded and installed from software repositories using the Apt program, apt-get. This section shows recommended Apt sources.list files, which reference software repositories for each node. There are separate list files for each Debian distribution. This section also lists commands that can be run on a node to overwrite the sources.list file with the recommended value and to download the GPG signing key used by the software repository on the management server.