The official Proxmox ISO, an answer file baked into it, and QEMU running it
against the physical disks from the rescue system. Options were looked up
rather than recalled: prepare-iso takes --fetch-from iso, --answer-file and
--on-first-boot, and it names its own output, so the finished ISO is found by
glob afterwards instead of being handed an --output flag I would have invented.
validate-answer runs BEFORE the ISO is baked. An answer file with a typo drops
the installer into interactive mode, where it then hangs invisibly inside QEMU
until the hour runs out — the failure would arrive as a timeout and say nothing
about the cause.
The codename table comes over verbatim from InstallProxmoxVe.php, which the
platform plan deletes. It is used here to install the assistant into the RESCUE
system, so it keys off the rescue system's own codename. An unknown one aborts;
not "trixie is newest, so trixie", because the next Debian will be unknown too
and by then nobody is watching.
The ISO is checksummed against the mirror's SHA256SUMS. Booting an operating
system that could have become anything in transit is not a risk worth taking,
and a truncated download is enough to cause it — malice is not required.
The reboot carry-across is the gap this plan was amended for, and [first-boot]
takes exactly one executable. So that one file carries everything: the script,
its lib/, the progress file and the arguments, as a base64 archive in its own
body. That also avoids importing the fresh ZFS pool from the rescue system to
copy files into it.
Two bugs found by running it rather than reading it. The staging copy put the
work directory inside the state directory, so cp refused to copy a directory
into itself — and had it not refused, the gigabyte ISO would have been base64'd
into the hook that gets baked into that same ISO. The fix is not a better
exclude: the two directories have opposite lifetimes, so they now live in
different places, and a guard refuses loudly if anyone points them at each other
again. Structure beats a rule someone has to remember.
Verified without hardware: both files pass sh and dash. The generated answer
file parses as TOML with the expected disk-list, zfs.raid, zfs.arc-max,
first-boot and network.filter, and a 64-character root password. The codename
table accepts bookworm and trixie and refuses bullseye and forky. The shim comes
out at 26 KB with a 3 MB dummy ISO sitting in the work directory, proving it
stayed out. Run in a fresh debian:13-slim container it unpacks to
/opt/clupilot/bootstrap and /var/lib/clupilot, restores the progress file with
its original timestamp, has 700 on the directory and 600 on the arguments that
hold the WireGuard key, skips rescue_checked as already done, and fails cleanly
on the missing qemu. Step 2 stays unticked: a container is not a rescue system,
and nothing here has yet written to a disk.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
nexxo