Motivation

I wanted to be able to quickly launch new Virtual Machines in my hypervisor (Proxmox) with minimal interaction. For scenarios where a KVM is preferred over a LXC.

Purpose

This script will generate a debian 9 iso with a preseed configuration which provides an semi-automated installation of the standard Debian packages. It is a semi-automatic installation because it will prompt for the machine's hostname.

• Generates a random password for the root user.
• Install only the standard debian packages, sudo, apt-transport-https, and aptitude.
• Create an Admin user with specified password.
• Populate the Admin user's .ssh/authorized_keys file with the specified public key.
• Set the timezone to your timezone.
• Set the domain name to desired value or localhost.

Requirements

You must have already downloaded a Debian 9 iso and mounted it somewhere on your computer.

curl -L -O https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso
mkdir /tmp/debian-9-iso
sudo mount -o loop debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso  /tmp/debian-9-iso

Usage

Run the create-iso.sh script from anywhere: /path/to/repository/create-iso.sh and input the information as you are prompted.

The generated iso will be created in the current working directory.

When the Grub loader for the iso opens, select Automatic Install. After a short period of time, you will be prompted to input the hostname. The installation will automatically run to completion after that point.