Well yes, grub-reboot works – but only once you’re aware of the fact that you need to manually edit /etc/default/grub. It’s actually documented at wiki.debian.org/GrubReboot, but not in the man page/info document of grub-reboot itself (great idea to provide a separate wiki page for this issue but not consider editing the official documentation instead, not).

So here you go:

# grep GRUB_DEFAULT /etc/default/grub 
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
# sed -i 's/^GRUB_DEFAULT.*/GRUB_DEFAULT=saved/' /etc/default/grub
# grep GRUB_DEFAULT /etc/default/grub 
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved

# update-grub
[...]
# grep '^menuentry' /boot/grub/grub.cfg
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (recovery mode)' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.32-20-pve' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.32-20-pve (recovery mode)' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (recovery mode)' --class debian --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {

# grub-reboot 2  # to boot the third entry, the command writes to /boot/grub/grubenv
# reboot

FTR: Filed as #707695.

• grml2usb: install Grml system / ISO to usb device
• grml-debootstrap: wrapper around debootstrap for installing pure Debian
• grml-rescueboot: Integrates Grml ISO booting into GRUB

As the description states grml2usb is interesting for getting Grml onto a USB device when the dd(1) approach (“dd if=grml.iso of=/dev/sdX“) just isn’t flexible enough.

grml-debootstrap provides a decent way to install Debian systems from the command line. As its author I might be biased but I’ve to mention that it’s working so nice that it is in use at several of my customers for automated roll-outs without any worries at all, and I got reports from other companies that they are very happy users of it as well.

Finally the grml-rescueboot packages provides a very simple and nice way to boot a rescue system from within GRUB (short version: throw a Grml ISO to /boot/grml/, run update-grub and be done).

PS: Thanks everyone for joining the #newinwheezy game over at planet.debian.org.

• dc3dd: patched version of GNU dd with forensic features
• extundelete: utility to recover deleted files from ext3/ext4 partition
• rephrase: Specialized passphrase recovery tool for GnuPG
• rkhunter: rootkit, backdoor, sniffer and exploit scanner (see comments)
• rsakeyfind: locates BER-encoded RSA private keys in memory images
• undbx: Tool to extract, recover and undelete e-mail messages from .dbx files

Join the #newinwheezy game and present packages which are new in Debian/wheezy.

Thanks to libldm’s ldmtool this is no longer true. A short demonstration from a real-life IT forensics investigation (actual IDs/data randomized for obvious reasons):

# ldmtool
ldm> scan /dev/sdc*
[
  "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003"
]
ldm> show diskgroup 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003
{
  "name" : "FOOBAR-Dg0",
  "guid" : "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003",
  "volumes" : [
    "Volume1"
  ],
  "disks" : [
    "Disk1",
    "Disk2"
  ]
}
ldm> show volume 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003 Volume1
{
  "name" : "Volume1",
  "type" : "striped",
  "size" : 3907039232,
  "chunk-size" : 128,
  "hint" : "D:",
  "partitions" : [
    "Disk1-01",
    "Disk2-01"
  ]
}
ldm> show partition 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003 Disk1-01
{
  "name" : "Disk1-01",
  "start" : 1985,
  "size" : 1953519616,
  "disk" : "Disk1"
}
ldm> create all
Unable to create volume Volume1 in disk group 1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003: Disk Disk2 required by striped volume Volume1 is missing
[
]
ldm> scan /dev/sdd*
[
  "1bad5bbc-a4b5-42e1-8823-001014b00003"
]
ldm> create all
[
  "ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1"
]
ldm>

The just created device mapper device then can be handled as usual:

# dmsetup ls | grep ldm
ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1        (254:4)
# mount /dev/mapper/ldm_vol_FOOBAR-Dg0_Volume1 /mnt/whatever

ldmtool just hit Debian unstable (and I intend to ship the tool with the upcoming version of Grml-Forensic).

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 that took place) and builds according source and binary packages out of it. Its lintitan integration provides Q/A reports about the resulting source and binary Debian packages.

It started as a small pet project of mine to get integration of Debian packaging inside Jenkins. I mainly had the needs for the Grml project in mind and starting with Grml 2011.12 every release (including also all the daily builds) was built using Jenkins since then. It turned out that my project would also be a perfect match for one of my customers, Sipwise GmbH. In December 2011 the sip:provider 2.4 was the first stable release that was built 100% through Jenkins and featuring jenkins-debian-glue.

Thanks to special needs and the open source friendliness of Sipwise I could invest further time into the project. Recently the project got even some further drive thanks to interest by some fellow Debian Developers, most notably are the icinga, nagios-plugins,… packages and the PostgreSQL in Debian Hackathon.

Now if you’re also interested in it: there’s an automated deployment procedure available for your service to get started with the whole jenkins-debian-glue and Jenkins stack in less than 10 minutes, working just fine on Debian as well as Ubuntu.

For further details please head over to jenkins-debian-glue.org or check out this 6:36min screencast (safe for work, no audio ):

This embedded video doesn’t work for you? Try heading over to YouTube.

I’ve been using git-svn to handle the FAI svn repository for at least as long as I’m wearing the FAI stable release manager hat. But the tags, author information,… inside my git-svn checkout weren’t ready for official publishing yet…

There are at least two different well known and referenced svn2git implementations out there. I decided to give the one hosted on github a shot because it’s mentioned at http://help.github.com/import-from-subversion/. It basically uses git-svn and just does the few annoying steps for you that I’d had to do manually otherwise. For more complex repositories the other svn2git implementation might be worth a try, especially since it’s supported by the svneverever tool. svneverever supports more flexible rules regarding the repository layout (it was used for switching Gentoo’s Portage from Subversion to Git). Luckily we didn’t need it in our situation and I had experience with git-svn on the FAI repository already, so…

Converting the repository was as simple as running:

% svn2git svn://svn.debian.org/svn/fai --authors ../fai-svnauthors

The ../fai-svnauthors file contains all the “svnuser = Realname <mail@example.org>” mappings to get the author information right. Some 41 minutes later svn2git finished its work. Finally I pushed the result to the FAI repository at github.

If you’re interested in the repository size of svn vs. git:

• svn repository (server side): 155MB
• svn checkout (client side): 318.3MB (4.3MB trunk, 301MB tags, 13MB branches)
• git-svn checkout: 13MB
• git repository/checkout: 7.1MB

This embedded video doesn’t work for you? Try heading over to YouTube.

Since its my first screencast please let me know what you think of it. Waste of time? Want to see further screencasts about Zsh, Grml,…? Is there any other platform than YouTube better suited for such screencasts (for the creator as well as the visitor’s point of view)? Is there anything specific I might consider changing in upcoming screencasts?

• Apache
• Bazar
• cocos2d-x
• ConfigureMe/DistributeMe/MoSKito
• coreboot
• Creativecommons
• Django CMS
• Doom Port Build Service
• Eclipse Communication Framework
• Freeswitch
• Grml
• iceScrum
• JBoss
• Jenkins
• JMRI
• JRuby
• KDE
• Linaro
• Mahara
• Mozilla
• Nuxeo
• OpenQuake
• Pentaho
• Piwik
• Plone
• PODAM
• Pylons Project
• Saiku
• Scala-Tools
• SQLAlchemy
• SQLAlchemy-migrate
• Tapestry 5 modules breadcrumbs + tagselect
• TYPO3
• UTGB (University of Tokyo Genome Browser) Toolkit
• Wicket Stuff
• Zikula

Open source projects using Jenkins, though Jenkins service not accessible for the public (yet):

• Evolvis
• Fusionforge
• Icinga
• Joomla
• OpenJDK 7 for OS/X
• Openstack
• sip:provider CE

And Cloudbees hosts some OSS projects providing Jenkins as a service.

Update [2011-09-05]: I put the list to the jenkins wiki under https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Meet+Jenkins -> https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=58001258

Update [2011-08-29]: thanks for all the feedback, I’ve updated the list accordingly.
If you’re aware of another open source project using Jenkins please leave it in the comments, I’ll update the list accordingly then.