IncusOS image customizer - disk wipe option

IncusOS
1

I have a stack of machines to re-image and have to disable secure boot, pxe boot to wipe the disc then re-enable secure boot to boot off the incusos install usb stick.

The USB stick will not install to the HD if it finds IncusOS already installed so I would love the ability to wipe the disc from the USB stick.

Does this functionality already exist in the extended options? I was thinking that we could have an extended option to add an option to the menu to wipe hard disc and that would meet this pattern.

In the web customizer disc options there is an option to wipe disk. That might be a place to have an option to wipe IncusOS install before installing.

I looked around but could not find the web customizer code to take a peek.

Thanks,

Alan

2

I’m currently working on making it easier to re-install a system that already has IncusOS installed on it (Provide a way to re-install a system · Issue #814 · lxc/incus-os · GitHub). :slight_smile:

The web customizer code is located at incus-os/incus-osd/cmd/image-customizer at main · lxc/incus-os · GitHub.

1 Like
3

It looks like that is merged so if I read that correctly, force_install needs to be set and it is on my downloaded img install.yml

install.yaml
version: "1"
force_install: true
force_reboot: true
target: null

If I understand that PR correctly, I need to set force_install_confirmation: “123456” where that is the first six chars of the machine-id.

So this means that a reinstall image needs to be baked with the output of cut -c106 /etc/machine-id and is unique to each system?

I looked at my running nodes and they seem to start with 4C4C45 so I’m guessing I could add

force_install_confirmation: "4C4C45"

and I would have a usb image that would overwrite the existing install?

5

Oh wait….. I modified the install.yaml of 20260308. I need to pull something fresh as that merge only went in 3/18. I’ve not peeped at the release pattern to understand that but I’m pretty sure that no time machines are involved so a 3/08 image is not going to work. LOL

7

Bother… force_install_confirmation values are system specific so i need to create an image for each system’s install generated machine-id. I can why that protection would be good but it’s not super useful for usb key installs like my case.

8

I hacked my way down the rabbit hole to figure out that for my pattern, I would like to allow overwrite without matching but then I started wondering about the secure boot signing patterns and fell into a different rabbit hole.