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Russell Fulton avatar Server

Ubuntu 20.04 server install failing from live cd

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Russell Fulton

I have two Dell servers in a lights out data centre that I am trying to upgrade to ubuntu 20.04. I am accessing the servers via idrac and mounting CD virtually from my laptop at home. ISO is ubuntu-20.04.2-live-server-amd64 (I originally tried 20.04.01 which I have used successfully previously).

I am working remotely via VPN (fortigate) and again I have done this before and been surprised how well it works.

From idrac I mount the virtual media and reboot, select boot menu at the appropriate time and then select virtual CD. A second or two later the console clears and there are two icons at the bottom as expected.

enter image description here

quite what the coloured bars are in aid of I don't know but they keep getting deeper with time. They display the same in two different browsers (firefox and safari) I wondered if they were rendering problem with html5.

The display stays like this for some time ( around half an hour) and then displayed "decoding failed -- system halted" or fills with screeds of error messages ending in a kernel panic.

Any idea what the root cause is likely to be and how I might work around it?

I am guessing that the ISO image is getting corrupted somehow but it is weird that it takes over half an hour to decide this.

It is also weird that it happens on two different servers.

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Russell Fulton avatar
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Russell Fulton
It appears that the problem is that the ISO image is getting corrupted when uploaded via the VPN. How or why is anyone's guess -- it used to work fine. I have managed to get one machine installed and am now just repeating the install on the other one in the hope of getting a good upload. Long term solution is to set up the necessary infrastructure to do a PXE boot but that involves getting a tftp server setup somewhere and fiddling with DHCP both of which should be doable in the medium term.
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Gerald Schneider

Wat you can do:

  • Check the checksum of the .ISO if you suspect it is corrupted.
  • Are you mounting it from your local machine via VPN? If yes, place it in the datacenter and mount it directly, mounting it from a remote location will slow it down significantly

I've never seen the artifacts on the bottom, but I wouldn't pay much attention to them, it's most probably just a cosmetic display error.

In my experience the boot menu is shown instantly when I press Enter at the screen with the two icons.

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Russell Fulton avatar
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Russell Fulton
Thank for the suggestions.I checked the IOS first thing! The ISO is OK.
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Russell Fulton avatar
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Russell Fulton
As I said the data centre is lights out and in good times it is difficult to get access to. In lockdown it would take a major emergency to get someone in there! Hence I am stuck doing it this way.
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Gerald Schneider
You don't need to go there physically. Just place the iso on a machine there and connect it as you would via VPN.
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Ari 'APz' Sovijärvi avatar Server
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Ari 'APz' Sovijärvi

You say you're upgrading them, are you perhaps already running a previous version of Ubuntu? If so, you can just use do-release-upgrade to upgrade.

If you're switching distributions or want a fresh start, download yourself the "network boot" variant (it's called mini.iso) which is Debian Installer based and runs in text mode, which might help in case the graphical UI messes up the DRAC.

The netboot variant is available here for 20.04: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/installer-amd64/current/legacy-images/netboot/

Edit: You don't need PXE environment to boot the mini.iso, just burn it/mount it in remote console and fire away.

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Russell Fulton avatar
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Russell Fulton
Hmmm netboot would appear to be an option but will require some set up which is probably worth the effort as the problem of upgrading these machines is not going to go away any time soon. I will mark this a the correct answer.
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Ari 'APz' Sovijärvi avatar
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Ari 'APz' Sovijärvi
Note that you can download the mini.iso and boot that directly, in which case you don't need the PXE environment. The CD image has just enough stuff to download the installer components and start it.
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