Preseeding is a handy way of automating Debian installations. With a proper preseed.cfg, a Debian installation can run completely unattended in about 10 minutes, including setup of users, sudo and SSH keys.

For future reference, here are the things I found helpful

custom post-installation commands

d-i preseed/late_command executes arbitrary commands after the installation is completed. I use this to set up SSH keys and sudo, like so:

in-target mkdir -p /root/.ssh /home/derf/.ssh; \
in-target wget -O /root/.ssh/authorized_keys https://.../keys-root; \
in-target wget -O /home/derf/.ssh/authorized_keys https://.../keys; \
in-target chmod 700 /root/.ssh /home/derf/.ssh; \
in-target chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys /home/derf/.ssh/authorized_keys; \
in-target chown -R derf:derf /home/derf/.ssh; \
apt-install sudo; in-target adduser derf sudo

Adding preseed.cfg to virt-install images

--initrd-inject embeds arbitrary files into the root of the installation image. So, for preseeding, just add --initrd-inject .../preseed.cfg to your virt-install invocation.

Adding preseed.cfg to USB images (with UEFI support)

This is a bit more tricky. Basically: Download and unpack ISO, inject preseed.cfg into initrd, refresh md5sums, rebuild ISO and add UEFI support.

The following script should do the job for most amd64 systems. Usage: ./mkpreseediso debian-x.y.z-amd64-netinst.iso

#!/bin/sh

set -e

ISO="$1"
WD="$(mktemp -d)"

7z x -o$WD $ISO

cd $WD

gunzip install.amd/initrd.gz
cp /tmp/preseed.cfg .
echo preseed.cfg | cpio -o -H newc -A -F install.amd/initrd
rm preseed.cfg
gzip install.amd/initrd

find -follow -type f -print0 | xargs --null md5sum > md5sum.txt

cd

xorriso -as mkisofs -o $ISO -isohybrid-mbr /usr/lib/ISOLINUX/isohdpfx.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table -eltorito-alt-boot -e boot/grub/efi.img -no-emul-boot \
-isohybrid-gpt-basdat $WD