I’m currently working on building a high availability ProxMox cluster (hurry up FedEx). One of the things I want to do with it is use more scratch VM, when working on things. The only issue is, installing Debian takes time. Yeah I could make a template in ProxMox, but I want something a little, better.

Fully Automatic Installation

After a bit of searching online, I found a site called FAI (see header). And I really wish I found this sooner.

In short, they have a tool where you can pre-set all of the main Debian install options. You can also set extra packages to install (like fish), and even provide a script to run on first boot (like chsh -s $(which fish) root).

After a minute or so, the site generates an install iso, that’ll do what you told it to. Without any input.

So I downloaded the iso into my ProxMox server, and fired up a VM.

After a couple minutes, I was greeted with a Debian login screen. All the packages I asked for were installed, and my first boot script set fish as my shell. 🐠

This is going to save me a bunch of time. And make me more likely to spin up scratch VMs.