My talk proposal for LOADays 2014 has been accepted. That makes the fifth consecutive time I'll be speaking there. I like this little event; it's small but always seems to come with some good content. And as someone who's ended up being a system administrator for most of my career, I can always find something interesting to talk about.
This time around, my talk will be about debian-installer automation. I plan to explain a bit how d-i is structured internally so as to help people understand better how things work, and will then run a little demo on how we used preseeding to install the 45 laptops for FOSDEM with (almost) no user input.
I've also decided to use libreoffice impress this time around, so I can try out the impress remote. Let's see how it goes.
See you there?
That will be brilliant. I hope it will be recorded for those of us who cannot attend in person. Many have found preseeding the installer very difficult to get right, owing to inadequate documentation and lack of diagnostic messages if the preseed file does not contain the correct incantation, and this leads to many hours lost repeating the installation trying different variants. I think this writer's experience is quite typical:
http://www.hps.com/~tpg/notebook/autoinstall.php
Once you eventually figure out the right preseed options for your setup though, the completely automated installation is a joy to use.