tasksel contains no useful settings
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ubuntu AMI Testing |
Confirmed
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Much like https:/
AMIs used (both display the problem):
# ami-ec527998 - Europe 32bit RC image.
# ami-2132d148 - US 32bit RC image.
On the current RC image, tasksel offers the following options on first boot:
Choose software to install:
[*] Basic Ubuntu server
[*] OpenSSH server
[*] Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (instance)
As all are selected, simply running 'sudo tasksel --section server' obviously simply returns and does nothing.
While after running apt-get update:
[*] Basic Ubuntu server
[ ] Cloud computing cluster
[ ] Cloud computing node
[ ] DNS server
[ ] Edubuntu server
[ ] LAMP server
[ ] Mail server
[*] OpenSSH server
[ ] PostgreSQL database
[ ] Print server
[ ] Samba file server
[ ] Tomcat Java server
[*] Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (instance)
[ ] Virtual Machine host
Either motd has to be updated (as previously suggested), or ec2-init or something else needs to run apt-get update.
Confirmed by running ami-2132d148.
Though it would partly solve this particular problem, I recommend against running apt-get update on boot because:
1) The user may want to install a different apt sources list on first boot, say point to the RightScale Ubuntu archive mirror which reflects packages as of a specific historical date which has been QA'd with that user's application. Running apt-get update on the wrong mirror just complicates and slows down the initialization process.
2) Having a startup process run apt-get update makes other startup processes (e.g., apt-get install in a user-data script) have to figure out a way to wait until the apt-get update finishes. This makes life a bit more complicated than just having the user-data script run apt-get update itself.
3) Many startup scripts today already run apt-get update and they will fail if the resources are locked by another process. (I ran into this on previous Canonical AMIs which did apt-get update on boot).