Static network configuration in Preseed files

[0xMishee]

Hello,

Been trying to get both Hedgehog and Malcolm ISOs to work with Ludus the past couple of days. But recently just found out that the preseed files that are included implements static IP addressing. This causes issues if you want to create your own .cfg file due to the VMs network configuration from Proxmox is being overridden, resulting it not being able to fetch the file/s.

You could at the step of downloading the .cfg file open a shell and run dhclient -v to get a new lease, however, this still breaks the automated installation scripts resulting it that it never catches if it boots up after installation.

(Same preseed for both ISOs).
https://github.com/cisagov/Malcolm/blob/main/hedgehog-iso/config/includes.binary/install/preseed_base.cfg

Question here would be if there are any particular reasons why its statically defined here for both ISOs files. If for no dependency reason, perhaps look into changing it to not being statically defined.

Br

[mmguero]

copy/paste of my comment here:

Sorry I didn't respond last week, I was out of town for personal reasons.

When updating the base OS for the Malcolm and Hedgehog ISOs to debian 13, I found that I could not get the installer to bypass any network configuration regardless of what I set in the preseed files. As a workaround for this, I set, during the installer, hedgehog and Malcolm installers to static IP addresses in the 192.0.0.0/24 private space, but this should only be for the duration of the installer itself (which doesn't actually need to access the internet): after the installer is finished in the "clean-up" (preseed/late_command) steps both hedgehog and Malcolm installers clear out that temporary static config (hedgehog, malcolm) so that it shouldn't be using that IP address once the platform actually boots the first time. Are you seeing that address being assigned even after the first boot after the install?

EDIT: Ah, I see after reading your comment a few more times. The issue is you do want it to use DHCP, which is not our usual use case for these ISOs. Hmmm, I'll have to think about some way that we could allow dhcp to be specified if desired, but not to do so as the default, as the installer should be able to run without networking at all in air-gapped environments and I don't want it prompting the user to have to do networking stuff if dhcp fails.

[0xMishee]

No worries, thanks for the reply.

Yea, I sort figured that with the static IP that the ISO was suppose to be quite self-contained in the that it shouldn't need to fetch anything ; thus making it suitable for air-gapped environments. My scenario in that sense is quite the opposite, I want to utilize it in a infrastructure as code setup where networking is configured and handled by Proxmox.

Haven't tested yet, but just commenting out the static config, add some DHCP ones in the preseed file and re-assemble it perhaps would do the job. This wouldn't perhaps be ideal for a lot of people since it does require some more hands tweaking before using it. Another way would perhaps adding the possibility to specify DHCP as a boot-command.