PXE installer doesn't configure network

[quentin]

When choosing option "2" from the PXE installer (for regular debathena installs), it first prompts you for an IP address, and then installs a machine that's configured to boot with DHCP. This results in the machine thinking it is NIC.MIT.EDU, among other oddities.

[jdreed]

The installer should either use the IP it's given, or should explicitly say "This IP address is only for installation, you will need to configure your machine once installation is completely, see  http://help.ubuntu.com/blah"

[broder]

oremanj submitted this patch which may fix a lot of this problem

[geofft]

The patch was committed in r24247. I've deployed that patch, plus some other cleanup in r24272 et seq. However, we still need either some text to the effect of what jdreed wrote, or stuff in the postinstall script (probably install-debathena.sh) to be willing to configure a static IP in the install target for more than just cluster machines, to actually resolve this bug.

[jdreed]

I think we should ask "Would you like to use this IP for the installed machine?" and if the user answers 'yes', then we configure a static IP the same way we do for -cluster. It's easy enough to switch to NM-controlled configuration later on, we can document that.

[amb]

Assuming we're going to continue starting a new kernel after collecting the network information, we can pass the kernel the relevant netcfg options and the debian installer will set up the installed system to match, which I think is exactly what we want. (We can also punt the code for that in install-debathena.sh.)

[amb]

Since we have in fact been doing all PXE installs via kexec for a while now, with real network settings, the installed systems should actually be getting the user-specified network settings which are passed as kernel arguments.

We should still test that, though, and probably rip out the post-install network tweaks for cluster systems which are likely somewhere between useless and actively harmful in the right edge case.