Univention Bugzilla – Bug 48123
Allow update of net installers with repository update
Last modified: 2019-08-07 09:44:55 CEST
Currently users have to manually execute univention-repository-create or download the files manually to get net installers for new UCS releases. It'd be nice to move them to the repository and thus have them covered by univention-repository-update.
Created attachment 9787 [details] Update PXE installer with repository-update
Since the update to UCS 4.4 is available now this would improve the update experience for customers using PXE. Also there's already a patch available so this seems like a "low hanging fruit". Afaik this hasn't been prioritized so far, has it?
I don't think this is a good idea. We had this automated in the past and it breaks some setups, for example: A customer automated the deployment based on the behavior of the UCS 4.3 installation process and adds UCS 4.4 to the repository to test the upgrade. As the upgrade to UCS 4.4 is small, he might want to keep the existing UCS 4.3 based deployment and just add an upgrade in the end. If we automate the upgrade of the installer, we most probably break the existing UCS 4.3 based installation process. To improve the behavior I suggest to: - make this per "opt in", for example add a command line option to the repository upgrade script to upgrade the installer also - inform at the end of the repository upgrade whether the installer has been upgraded (only the case if the command line option was set) and how to do it manually (call the existing tool)
(In reply to Ingo Steuwer from comment #4) > I don't think this is a good idea. We had this automated in the past and it > breaks some setups, for example: Read the source! Currently you have the download the ISO manually and run `univention-repository-*create* --iso ...` manually. The patch _adds_ an option to `univention-reporitoy-*update*` to download the updates files for the PXE installation. > A customer automated the deployment based on the behavior of the UCS 4.3 > installation process and adds UCS 4.4 to the repository to test the upgrade. This is not this issue here: The is no *automatic* udpate, just a new option to *manually* update the files. > To improve the behavior I suggest to: > - make this per "opt in", for example add a command line option to the > repository upgrade script to upgrade the installer also This is what my attached patch does! > - inform at the end of the repository upgrade whether the installer has been > upgraded (only the case if the command line option was set) and how to do it > manually (call the existing tool) Not updated by default.
(In reply to Philipp Hahn from comment #5) > Currently you have the download the ISO manually and run > `univention-repository-*create* --iso ...` manually. > The patch _adds_ an option to `univention-reporitoy-*update*` to download > the updates files for the PXE installation. [..] Thanks for making that clear, so the patch is closer to what I wrote than to the initial request. To make this helpful and transparent for the user, I suggest to also add a message to the normal updater in case an old net installer was found and inform whether an update of the net installer has been done or should be made.
Again this has been a real pain to update 4 PXE environments at a customer site, especially as it lead to hard-to-debug errors: In that case the customer was using 4.3-2 and changed the release to 4.3-4 - but ONYL the repositories in the PXE installation profile - they did NOT update the "linux" and "initrd.gz" files to match that newer version. That leads to Linux kernel modules not being loaded ("bridge", "bonding") with only a very hidden message in "/var/log/installer/syslog". As both releases are using a Linux 4.9 kernel, this message was hard to spot. Debugging this is very painful (1½ days), as the PXE environment is quiet limited and capturing the right output is difficult. At the end I wrote them a custom script to download the two files from <https://updates.software-univention.de/pxe/>, which duplicate my work already done for this bug.