mikas blog

Distrowatch, Heise, Pro-Linux, Symlink, Golem & CO already have the news: a new version of the Debian based Live system for system administrators has been released: Grml 2009.10 – Codename ‘Hello-Wien‘.
One visible new feature is the new bootsplash which should lead you through the most important boot options. The new release features kernel 2.6.31.5 with [...]

Live-initramfs is a fork of Ubuntu’s casper for use within Debian. Nowadays several Debian based live systems are using live-initramfs to build an initramfs suited to boot live systems. Besides debian-live and all its users that’s at least Grml (and its derivates) and FAI.
I’m maintaining live-initramfs for Grml – so I know the limitations [...]

Now being an official Debian developer I’ve the possibility to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org for my Debian packages. But whereas I want to use that for all my official Debian packages I still want to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org for my grml related packages. I’m a lazy sysadmin and don’t want to manually adjust my changelogs depending on the [...]

Since 2009-05-28 I’m an official Debian Developer.
Thanks to all involved people. Special thanks to Gerfried ‘Rhonda’ Fuchs for being my advocate and a helpful package sponsor, to Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt for being a helpful package sponsor, to Christoph ‘Myon’ Berg and Bernd ‘bzed’ Zeimetz from the frontdesk and to Marc ‘he’ Brockschmidt for being a [...]

With grub2 you can directly boot an (iso9660) ISO using its loopback option. This is great because it provides another nice rescue scenario – for example when using grml (the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins). You no longer need to extract kernel and initrd from the ISO to be able to boot it using [...]

Alright, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA as Lenny has been released. Time for a Debian unstable unfreeze party!
What does the new stable release bring for system administrators? I’ll give an overview what news you might expect when upgrading from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename Etch (released on 8th April 2007) to the current version Debian [...]

grml release delayed through a CBS commedy series. News at 11<Rhonda />
There we go: there’s a new grml release (you know, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users). The release with codename Schluchtenscheisser and version number 2008.11 is available in different variants. The 32bit versions grml, grml-medium and grml-small as well as [...]

For the last few days I’ve been in the city Badajoz in region Extremadura of Spain at the FAI developer meeting. Check out the Linex Euronews Video at youtube to get a short impression of Linux in the region.
Lessions learnt:

debcommit is great, it generates a commit message based on new text in debian/changelog (thanks for [...]

Martin, sorry for calling you Madduck on the debian.ch-mailinglist. Luckily I didn’t use that name during our meeting in Zurich last week. *pfuh*
To take part in the pdo-game with my own name (being Michael Prokop ): as many of you might know I’m known as Mika in the community. The name was [...]

Do you know the situation where you just aren’t sure whether you are spelling a word the right way? If you know how to type the word pretty well, then a dictionary might work just fine. If you aren’t sure at all you might consider using Google’s ‘Did you mean’-feature. Check out a simple demonstration [...]

It’s done, we have new releases of grml, the Debian-based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users:
grml 1.1 (32bit) – Codename Skunk
grml64 0.2 (64bit) – Codename Schwammerlklauber
grml-medium 0.1 (32bit) / grml64-medium (64bit) – Codename Pfuh

It’s the first stable release being based on our new build-framework grml-live which itself is based on FAI (Fully Automatic [...]

Title: How to subtile fsck your Apache setup.
Solution (quoting the original command line):

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root www-data 33 2007-09-28 15:23 auth_basic.load -> ../mods-available/auth_basic.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root www-data 33 2007-09-28 15:23 authn_file.load -> ../mods-available/authn_file.load
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root www-data 36 2007-09-28 15:23 authz_default.load -> ../mods-available/authz_default.load

Disclaimer: no, it wasn’t me; it’s the log of a customer.
Credits: thanks to monitoring and [...]

Update on 2009-02-13: adjust zshrc setup as .zshrc.global is deprecated, see grml-zsh-refcard.
Update on 2008-10-10: replace old hg.grml.org URLs with current git.grml.org.
Update on 2009-08-11: refer to /etc/vim/vimrc as /etc/vim/vimrc and /etc/skel/.vimrc have been merged
You like grml’s Zsh, GNU screen and Vim configuration? No problem to get that on non-grml/non-Debian/non-Linux/… systems as well. Just copy/paste the following [...]

When cloning a Linux/Debian system 1:1 you should have a checklist of what’s important to change on the cloned system.
For cloning I use the grml Linux Live-CD of course (the following tips are part of grml-tips as well). To create a 1:1 clone I boot grml on the systems (usually using the ssh=password bootoption to [...]

The battery of your laptop keeps getting drained even though you are using Suspend-To-Disk [STD]? (No, I’m not talking about Suspend-To-RAM!) That’s what happens at least on my Lenovo ThinkPad X61s notebook. Thankfully there exists a workaround:
Check out what suspend method you use:

# cat /sys/power/disk
[platform] test testproc shutdown reboot

So by default ‘platform’ is used, which [...]

… or something like that… I planned to write a short note about how to start with using git-svn so I can provide a pointer to some of my colleagues. It turned out that git has too many nice features that you should be aware of. Hopefully my notes (now being a reference [...]

No, not running out of coffee (well, maybe) – but:

# ifup wlan=mika
[...]
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database.
Exiting.
Failed to bring up mika.

Looks like many people didn’t manage to solve this problem, so let’s feed google… If you notice the following error message when running apt-get:

# apt-get update
[...]
98% [Working]FATAL -> Could not set non-blocking flag Bad file descriptor
E: Method http has died unexpectedly!
# echo $?
100

… you forgot to mount the according partition using the dev mount option. [...]

[Gnaaaaa, sorry Planet Debian for sending a german article to you a few hours ago. I just chose the wrong category for the article. I removed the tag already and the article disappeared from Planet Debian right now; so if you don't know what I'm talking about just don't care. To the german [...]

I was working on the integration of live-initramfs for grml in the last few days. As the Debian maintainers of live-initramfs switched from svn to git and I contributed several patches I had to deal with git as well. Thanks to my personal VCS hero gebi I learned some cute tricks for working with git. [...]