Custom Debian 12 image fails to PXE boot

Users
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been trying to use a custom Debian 12 image on a bare-metal Dell server. I created the image and imported it into MAAS using the packer-maas repo: https://github.com/canonical/packer-maas/blob/main/debian/README.md

I created a new user on the maas server and followed the steps in the README file.

When trying to deploy a machine via the UI with this image, I see a “No such file or directory” error when the server tries to PXE boot.

pxe-boot
pxe-boot1299×511 251 KB

The Ubuntu images which are included by default work with no issues.

I’m using MAAS 3.6.0

Any ideas where I should be looking? I’m out of idea’s myself.

2

It might be the name you used to upload the custom image. Can you paste here the cli command you used to upload it?

3

Thank you for your reply,

I cloned the packer-maas repo and ran the following commands inside the debian directory to create and import the image.

packer init .
packer build -var debian_series=bookworm \
    -var debian_version=12 .

maas $PROFILE boot-resources create \
    name='custom/debian-12' \
    title='Debian 12 Custom' \
    architecture='amd64/generic' \
    filetype='tgz' \
    content@=debian-custom-cloudimg.tar.gz

This all seemed to work and the image was added to the server successfully.

One note I should probably add is that I first did this on the root user without success, when importing the image it told me it couldn’t find the image or it got a permission denied error. I solved this by creating a new user on the server and importing the image that way in the home directory of this user. Not sure if this could be related to the issue I’m having right now.

Edit: I forgot to mention I also added the custom preseed inside /var/snap/maas/current/preseeds/curtin_userdata_custom as described inside the packer maas repo and I see these errors inside the logs for the machine:
Marking node failed - Missing boot image custom/amd64/ga-24.04/debian-12.
Marking node failed - Missing kernel image custom/amd64/ga-24.04/debian-12.