Autoinstall Not Working on Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10

[bruno dias da silva]

I'm facing an issue while trying to install Ubuntu 22.04 using Autoinstall. It seems that Ubuntu is either not reading the user-data file or encountering an error without providing any specific details, even though the user-data works on another ISO of the same Ubuntu version.

During the process of loading the user-data configurations for Autoinstall, the installer simply skips to the language configuration step, and the installation proceeds manually.

I have two ISOs of Ubuntu Server 22.04, where the installation works on one but not on the other (using the same user-data). This indicates that the issue is not with the user-data file itself (I think so).

The working version is identified by the following command:

$ cat /srv/pxe_nfs/ubuntu2204_20230306/.disk/info
Ubuntu-Server 22.04.2 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Release amd64 (20230306)

While the non-working version is identified as:

$ cat /srv/pxe_nfs/ubuntu2204_20230728/.disk/info
Ubuntu-Server 22.04.2 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Release amd64 (20230728)

Interestingly, I was able to make it work by copying the 'ubuntu-server-minimal.squashfs' and 'ubuntu-server-minimal.squashfs.gpg' files from the working version to the non-working one. I believe this might provide a clue to pinpoint the problem. I had the same issue when testing Ubuntu 23.10, where the automatic installation also didn't work (I haven't tested if the described solution works for it yet).

Here's the command I used to solve it:

$ cp /srv/pxe_nfs/ubuntu2204_20230306/casper/{ubuntu-server-minimal.squashfs,ubuntu-server-minimal.squashfs.gpg} /srv/pxe_nfs/ubuntu2204_20230728/casper/

I got the ISO from the following link:

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/jammy/daily-live/current/jammy-live-server-amd64.iso

[bruno dias da silva (brunodiasinfo)]

I forgot to put the grub line, now follow:

menuentry 'Install Ubuntu 22.04 20230728 nocloud-net' {
        set gfxpayload=keep
        linux kernels/ubuntu2204_20230728/vmlinuz ip=dhcp netboot=nfs boot=casper nfsroot=192.168.100.4:/srv/pxe_nfs/ubuntu2204_20230728/ autoinstall ds="nocloud;s=/cdrom/nocloud/" ---
        initrd kernels/ubuntu2204_20230728/initrd
}

[Dan Bungert (dbungert)]

Thanks for the bug report. This should be the same issue as LP: #2022102, fix in progress.