mikas blog

For a recent customer setup of Debian/wheezy on a IBM x3630 M4 server we used my blog entry “State of the art Debian/wheezy deployments with GRUB and LVM/SW-RAID/Crypto” as a base. But this time we wanted to use (U)EFI instead of BIOS legacy boot. As usual we went for installing via Grml and grml-debootstrap. We […]

On 22nd of October 2004 an event called OS04 took place in Seifenfabrik Graz/Austria and it marked the first official release of the Grml project. Grml was initially started by myself in 2003 – I registered the domain on September 16, 2003 (so technically it would be 11 years already :)). It started with a […]

Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers. I’m responsible for a docker setup with Jenkins integration and a private docker-registry setup at a customer and pre-ordered James Turnbull’s “The Docker Book” a few months ago. Recently James – he’s working for Docker Inc – released the first version […]

Kamailio is an Open Source SIP Server. Since beginning of March 2014 a new setup for Kamailio‘s Debian packages is available. Development of this setup is sponsored by Sipwise and I am responsible for its infrastructure part (Jenkins, EC2, jenkins-debian-glue). The setup includes support for building Debian packages for Debian 5 (lenny), 6 (squeeze), 7 […]

In a project I recently worked on we wanted to provide a jenkins-debian-glue based setup on Amazon’s EC2 for building Debian and Ubuntu packages. The idea is to keep a not-so-strong powered Jenkins master up and running 24×7, while stronger machines serving as Jenkins slaves should be launched only as needed. The project setup in […]

Problem description: One of my customers had a problem with their Selenium tests in the Jenkins continuous integration system. While Perl’s Test::WebDriver still worked just fine the Selenium tests using Ruby’s selenium-webdriver suddenly reported failures. The problem was caused by Debian wheezy’s upgrade of the Iceweasel web browser. Debian originally shipped Iceweasel version 17.0.10esr-1~deb7u1 in […]

Update on 2014-03-03: quoting Colin Watson from the comments: Note that this is spelled GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK=y in GRUB 2.02 betas (matching the 2.00 documentation though not the implementation; not sure why Andrey chose to go with the docs). Since several people asked me how to get such a setup and it’s poorly documented (as in: I […]

Moving from Lilo to GRUB, using LVM as default, etc throughout the last years it was time to evaluate how well LVM works without a separate boot partition, possibly also on top of Software RAID. Big disks are asking for partitioning with GPT, just UEFI isn’t my default yet, so I’m still defaulting to Legacy […]

2013 was a fantastic year for me. Following the real-life fork it was the first year of my daughter’s life. Whenever I heard people saying “oh, children are growing sooooo fast” in the past it felt like a lie for me, but seeing your own child grow I can just sign that, and it’s fantastic. […]