1) When preseeding a debian install, you need the network up to be able to get to the preseed file.
2) The kernel used by debian-installer defaults to only allowing 256 characters on the append/cmdline.

Phil Hands did some stuff for etch / debian-installer to try to help out with this. This is the auto-install udeb. Most importantly is trying to get all the network information on the command line. We can do some tricks to save space.

1) Use preseed aliases where possible (Debian Manual, Appendix B 2.4)
2) Use ‘auto=true’ on the append line. This will use ai-choosers to delay locale/keyboard so you can specify these in your preseed file instead. It also lets you set ‘url=hostname.domain.org’ rather than a full path to your preseed file, but you’ll need symlinks so that ‘http://hostname/d-i/etch/preseed.cfg’ points to your config file. This is a little obtuse in the directions because most documentation talks about ‘auto’, but this is actually a label in the default debian pxelinux/syslinux.cfg files. Look in debian-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg from the netboot.tar.gz for an example.
3) Setup symlinks for your initrd so you can use something like ‘initrd=d/e/3/i” which is short for ‘initrd=debian/etch/i386/initrd.gz’

My append line ends up looking something like this:

append initrd=d/e/3/i auto=true url=debian.example.org hostname=myhost \

domain=example.org interface=eth0 netcfg/get_ipaddress=10.0.0.100 \

netcfg/get_netmask=255.255.255.0 netcfg/get_gateway=10.0.0.1 \

netcfg/get_nameservers=10.0.0.250 netcfg/disable_dhcp=true

It’s unfortunate that you’re required to add ‘netcfg/disable_dhcp=true’ to get netcfg to acknowledge that you’ve given it a static configuration. that’s a lot of wasted cmdline that may get you in trouble if you’re using high octets in ip addresses or a long hostname. That’s exactly 256 characters right there.

If I keep having problems with this, I’ll probably start using DHCP reservations instead of static addressing. You can even push the url out via dhcp. I’ve also gone back and shortened my url hostname to ‘d.example.org’ to gain a few more characters. I probably could just recompile the kernel to support more than 256 chars on the command line as well.