I’ve been playing around with a puppet recipe for ocsng and trying to get a preseed working that would create the database rather than debconf popping up with questions. This task had a number of difficulties.

1) Running the install by hand with apt-get never asked if I wanted to use another host for my mysql database. This is probably a bug, although I never tried changing my debconf priority level. because I eventually figured out from some source to use ‘method select tcp/ip’.

2) I started running into errors with debconf-set-selections erroring with ‘error: Cannot find a question for …’ Interestingly the only other place I saw this error was where someone was trying to do something similar with puppet and glpi in Puppet ticket #1213. I eventually found the series of events that caused this and how to work around them thanks to fjp and cjwatson (these two guys always seem to save my ass) giving me the right places to look. More about that in Debian bug #487300.

3) There isn’t an etch package for ocsng. Not a big deal, the lenny/testing packages don’t really have any new dependencies.

I thought there was something else, but maybe it was that easy. Here’s my seed file as an example:
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/dbconfig-install boolean true
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/mysql/admin-pass password supersecret
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/mysql/method select tcp/ip
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/mysql/app-pass password kindasecret
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/remote/host select mysql01.example.org
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/remote/newhost string mysql01.example.org
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/database-type select mysql
ocsinventory-server ocsinventory-server/db/dbname string ocsweb