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Updating the netboot image

The netboot image released by Debian does not contain non-free firmware (unless the regular installation media, this isn't for license reasons, but due to the complex process of generating the netboot images). After the release of a Debian point update we typically rebuild the installer image to include the necessary non-free firmware (which is needed to PXE boot).

The images are stored in the volatile repository in the tftpboot directory. The only users of this directory are the install and apt servers and these are on Puppet 7, as such we only need to update the volatile directory on puppetserver1001.

Simply run it with the distro which has seen a point update as a argument, e.g.

 sudo update-netboot-image bookworm

The script will download the latest bookworm netinst image, append the non-free firmware and then print instructions where to copy the result to (/srv/puppet_fileserver/volatile/tftpboot). You can run the script many times, the only permanent step (moving the result to the target directory) is a manual step (which has instructions printed).

d-i will always pick the DISTRO-installer name, so e.g. bookworm-installer. Before moving the result to volatile you can e.g. move the old one to bookworm-installer-x.y or so that you can revert to a working installer if the new Debian installer has bugs (which didn't happen so far).