What I would like to do is to make an autoinstaller that only installs the OS but would try to keep, and attach, an existing home directory - and automatically make the user(s) again.
But looking through Curtin storage documentation, it seems that there is no way to try to only set up certain storage if it isn't there, right? I.e. either you
- wipe everything, format the disk, make partitions, make LVM etc etc and overwrite everything;
- or you keep everything;
But you can't tell Curtin to look if there is anything to keep (then keep it, otherwise make it)?
I tried to
- ptable: gpt
path: /dev/nvme0n1
preserve: true
id: disk-nvm
[...]
- device: disk-nvm
size: 536870912
wipe: superblock
flag: boot
number: 1
preserve: false
- device: disk-nvm
type: partition
id: partition-2
size: -1
number: 2
preserve: true
grub_device: false
... but that would bail out telling me that partition 1 could not be made (yeah, because it was there already). Another setup where I tried to preserve a "home" lvm, wouldn't work out because home just wasn't there, the volume was created but it wasn't formatted (yeah, "If the preserve key is set to true, curtin will not format the partition" - apparently even not if it isn't formatted at all).
Oh, BTW, if anyone got a bright idea how to build an autoinstaller that would detect an existing /home somewhere and automatically add its users, please answer below.
(Auto-adding the users would be a simple trick, add user without password, password expired - I can do that, it's the preservation part that puzzles me).
