mikas blog

So while testing Proxmox VE 3.0 RC1 I had the need to reboot the system into a kernel version different than the one being the default in the bootloader GRUB. “lilo -R …” worked fine in the past, but with GRUB it’s not as trivial on the first sight to get its equivalent. I remembered [...]

Following up on the #newinwheezy game: Debian/wheezy is the first Debian release which ships packages from the Grml system. Grml became an official Debian Derivative and I’m very happy that three major projects of Grml found their official way into Debian: grml2usb: install Grml system / ISO to usb device grml-debootstrap: wrapper around debootstrap for [...]

Debian/wheezy includes a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics. The packages maintained within the Debian Forensics team which are shipped with the upcoming Debian/wheezy stable release for the first time in a Debian release are: dc3dd: patched version of GNU dd with forensic features extundelete: utility to recover deleted files from ext3/ext4 [...]

Ich bin zurück von der Open Source Data Center Conference 2013, sehr schön war es. Die Vortragsfolien zu meinem Vortrag “Continuous Integration im Rechenzentrum” habe ich soeben hochgeladen: PDF (4,4MB)

Linux is a great platform for dealing with all kinds of different file systems, partition tables etc. But one of the few annoying situations when working in IT forensics are Microsoft Windows dynamic disks, AKA LDM (Logical Disk Manager). Thanks to libldm’s ldmtool this is no longer true. A short demonstration from a real-life IT [...]

I’ll be speaker at the Open Source Data Center Conference 2013 in Nuremberg/Germany on 17th and 18th April, talking about Continuous Integration/Delivery in the data-center. I was speaking at OSDC back in 2009 and very much enjoyed the conference – so I’m totally looking forward to OSDC 2013, hope to see you there!

In the last few days several IT events published recordings/slides from their events. I haven’t had the time to take a closer look at the material yet but there might be some gems among them so I thought it’s worth spreading the word: Devopsdays Rome/Italy 2012: videos from the talks PuppetConf 2012: videos from the [...]

Since I’m not aware of a ready-to-go solution, this issue once again came up at a company where I’m doing Jenkins/CI consulting for and the solution involves some trickiness you need to be aware of I’m hereby documenting it. If you have a build pipeline inside your Jenkins setup you might have so called upstream [...]

Far away from Rosetta Code, but that’s what Frank and I came up with when explaining 100000₂: Guile: guile <<< \#b100000 guile -c ‘((@@ (ice-9 format) format) #t “~d~%” #b100000)’ Racket: racket -e ‘#b100000′ Ruby: ruby -e ‘puts “100000″.to_i(2)’ Python: python -c ‘print int(“100000″, 2)’ Perl: perl -e ‘print 0b100000′ Zsh: zsh -c ‘print $((2#100000))’ [...]

jenkins-debian-glue is an open source project of mine which recently celebrated its first birthday and it’s time to finally write about it. jenkins-debian-glue allows you to build Debian and Ubuntu packages directly from the Jenkins continuous integration system. It retrieves package sources from a version control repository, adjusts debian/changelog (handle version number + mention changes [...]

Am Samstag, dem 28. April finden heuer wieder die Grazer Linuxtage statt! Die Suche nach Vorträgen und Projektständen wurde soeben offiziell eröffnet. Wenn du ein spannendes Thema oder Projekt hast, über das du vor einem interessierten Publikum reden möchtest ist das deine Chance. Die Grazer Linuxtage feiern heuer ihren 10. Geburtstag(!) und wir erwarten auch [...]

December, release time. I’m currently involved in the release management of three major projects and it’s not always about fun. So lets make it more fun: https://github.com/mika/commit-sounds

Revision one in the Subversion repository of the FAI project dates back to the 27th of June 2000. Over the last few months we were discussing the switch to Git. At the last FAI meeting we decided to finally switch to Git and I volunteered to drive the migration. Today I officially did the migration. [...]

The “Directory specific shell configuration with Zsh” is a rocking feature I use in all my projects when working on the command line. I just created a screencast where I’m showing this feature in action, including its configuration: This embedded video doesn’t work for you? Try heading over to YouTube. Since its my first screencast [...]

For a (german) talk I’ll be giving soon I was interested in a list of open source projects which use Jenkins. Jenkins is a great open source continuous integration server. I was wondering whether such a list exists but since it doesn’t exist yet I created my own and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of Hudson/Jenkins) suggested [...]

Everyone loves stats, ok well – at least I do. I was doing some research with regards to package maintenance within the Debian distribution and since the results might be interesting for someone else – there we are. On 19th of August 2011 there have been: 16935 unique source packages in Debian/sid 9977 packages with [...]

Ich habe soeben “Das Git-Buch – Verteilte Versionsverwaltung für Code und Dokumente” von Valentin Haenel und Julius Plenz gelesen. Das deutschsprachige Buch füllt 328 Seiten und konkurriert mit freien Büchern wie dem Git Community Book, Pro Git und Git In the Trenches. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis des Buches sieht wie folgt aus: Einführung und erste Schritte Grundlagen [...]

I was giving a skills exchange session about Zsh at DebConf 11. I wasn’t expected to prepare the session, but since there was no video projector available in the meeting room I started to work on some notes. Looks like I suffer from presentation driven development, so the notes turned out to become bigger than [...]

i386 systems are dying off and therefore building 32bit Debian packages in 64bit environments is important if you still need packages for i386. For some recent projects I had to set up 64bit-only environments with the need to provide 32bit packages for i386 as well as according i386 Linux kernel packages. 1) Common Debian packages [...]

Background: Lars Wirzenius was searching for a tool to create virtual disk images. Turned out I needed something similar to improve the automatic deployment process of a customer’s platform installation. Being the author of the mentioned grml-debootstrap tool I started to work on deploying virtual disk images using grml-debootstrap. As a result I just uploaded [...]