mikas blog

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. [...]

Froscon rocks!
explored some more software in more detail, including op, dconf, dstat, unoconf, dwscan, ikiwiki, openQRM, Pentabarf, sl
it was great to meet so many people (some of them for the first time in RL), including Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt, Timo ‘Spida’ Boettcher, Marc ‘HE’ Brockschmidt, Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, [...]

The Debian-Team at the Debian-booth of Froscon 2007:

Standing (from left): Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, Luk Claes;
Sitting in the middle: Christoph ‘myon’ Berg

No, that’s not a joke. Today I had to (hard-)reboot one of my servers because the console newsreader slrn produced such a high load on the system that it was everything but responsive as a consequence.
Huh. What? Yes, right. It was the fault of slrn. I had not set up any default limits on the [...]

As I wrote a few monce ago I’m owner of a NSLU2 device powered by Debian. Now I had to install another device (using di-nslu2-etch-4.0r0.bin – md5: db8e8ec3571aff8fb2132479f860f16b this time) and I wanted to change the setup from using /dev/sda2 to a UUID based one – to get a stable root device.
Nothing really tricky [...]

Since about two days I’m proud owner of a Lenovo X61s notebook. It will become my main and new developer box for grml, featuring all that nifty stuff like 64bit support, hardware virtualization and so on…
I managed to use all the important features with a very current version of grml. I’m using kernel 2.6.22-grml on [...]

It was on my todo list since ages, finally I took some minutes to set up my own jabber server (reach me at mika@jabber.grml.org). I’m using ejabberd, a free and open source instant messaging server written in Erlang.
Reference system: Debian etch (current stable), ejabberd version 1.1.2-6, installed via a simple:

# aptitude install ejabberd
Adjust the hostname [...]

One of the coolest features of grml IMO is grml-tips. grml-tips is a collection of tips you can request via a keyword. For example if you want to know how to use grml-x just run ‘grml-tips grml-x’:

mika@meilenschwein ~ % grml-tips grml-x
Start X window system (XFree86 / Xorg / X.org):

% grml-x $WINDOWMANAGER

Usage examples:

% grml-x fluxbox
% grml-x [...]

Running hot off the press 2.6.22-grml I took a look at the current version of VirtualBox. And I’m really amazed how responsive it is. Not only booting grml is rocking fast but also typing on the console is reaaaally fast – much more responsive than with VMware. (I took a look at VirtualBox several months [...]

Quoting the project homepage:
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).
It really rocks, especially as it works for Linux/Unix as well [...]

Hopefully fuzz testing is well known nowadays, right? But did you check how smart your software can handle ENOSPC – the ‘No space left on device’ error?
I like stress testing software (to be honest: no, not really). Yesterday I debugged a problem regarding zsh history writing on ENOSPC. Usually I use the grml Linux live-cd [...]

I wrote a small python webpage for the grml-wiki to provide some information regarding Python-development on grml. I just upgraded Vim on my main system to version 7.1 and omnicompletion with vim-python became better once more. So time for a short demo of ctrl-x-o:

I also very much like ‘%ed’ within ipython using the following snippet [...]

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release [...]

It’s done. grml 1.0 is available. New features? Tons of them. Just check out the official release notes for grml 1.0. Need grml for a x86_64 system? No problem, grml64 0.1 is waiting for you. You are used to grml-small? Check out grml-small 0.4.
You want to know what are my favourite features of the [...]