mikas blog

Debian hard freeze on 2025-05-15? We bring you a new Grml release on top of that! 2025.05 🚀 – codename Nudlaug. There’s plenty of new stuff, check out our official release announcement for all the details. But I’d like to highlight one feature that I particularly like: SSH service announcement with Avahi. The grml-full flavor […]

Time flies by so quickly, it’s >20 years since I started the Grml project. I’m giving a (german) talk about the lessons learned from 20 years of running the Grml project this Saturday, 2025-04-26 at the Grazer Linuxtage (Graz/Austria). Would be great to see you there!

This topic came up at a customer of mine in September 2024, when working on Debian/trixie support. Since then I wanted to blog about it to make people aware of this new OpenSSH feature and behavior. I finally found some spare minutes at Debian’s BSP in Vienna, so here we are. :) Some of our […]

We did it again™! Just in time, we’re excited to announce the release of Grml stable version 2024.12, code-named ‘Adventgrenze’! (If you’re not familiar with Grml, it’s a Debian-based live system tailored for system administrators.) This new release is built on Debian trixie, and for the first time, we’re introducing support for 64-bit ARM CPUs […]

15 years ago I became an official Debian Developer. Incredible how time flies.

Auf den Grazer Linuxtagen 2024 (GLT24) war ich als Referent mit einem Vortrag zum Thema “We got hacked: Lektionen aus realen Security-Vorfällen” vertreten. In meinem Vortrag gibt es einen Einblick in reale Security-Incidents und welche Lektionen sich aus solchen Vorfällen mitnehmen lassen. Es gibt den Vortrag dank des fantastischen c3voc-Teams bereits als Videomitschnitt online. Meine […]

I’m one of the few folks left who run and maintain mail servers. Recently I had major troubles receiving mails from the mail servers used by a bank, and when asking my favourite search engine, I’m clearly

Debian v12 with codename bookworm was released as new stable release on 10th of June 2023. Similar to what we had with #newinbullseye and previous releases, now it’s time for #newinbookworm! I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bookworm. As usual with major upgrades, there are some […]

Auf den Grazer Linuxtagen 2023 (GLT23) war ich als Referent mit einem Vortrag zum Thema “Debugging für Sysadmins” vertreten. In meinem Vortrag gibt es einen Überblick, welche Tools und Strategien rund ums Debugging in der Toolbox von Sysadmins nicht fehlen dürfen. Es gibt den Vortrag dank des wunderbaren c3voc-Teams bereits als Videomitschnitt online. Meine Vortragsfolien […]

Update on 2023-03-23: thanks to Daniel Roschka for mentioning the Mandos and TPM approaches, which might be better alternatives, depending on your options and needs. Peter Palfrader furthermore pointed me towards clevis-initramfs and tang. A customer of mine runs dedicated servers inside a foreign data-center, remote hands only. In such an environment you might need […]

Die älteste mir zugängliche Mail von Sven Guckes direkt an mich stammt aus dem Jahr 2002, und startet seinerseits mit: eine dokumentierte loesung – das ist prima! :-) Natürlich ging es um: Vim. Viele Mails unter anderem zum Kunsthaus Graz, den Chemnitzer Linux-Tagen, den Grazer Linuxtagen (GLT) und seinem Geek Brunch sollten folgen. Unvergessen bleibt […]

Continuing with #newinbullseye. One package that isn’t new but its tools are used by many of us is util-linux, providing many essential system utilities. There is util-linux v2.33.1 in Debian/buster and util-linux v2.36.1 in Debian/bullseye, and as usual there are many new features and options available. I don’t want to replicate the release notes provided […]

Continuing with #newinbullseye, it’s worth being aware of, that efivars is gone with the kernel version shipped as of Debian/bullseye. Quoting from wiki.debian.org/UEFI: The Linux kernel gives access to the UEFI configuration variables via a set of files under /sys, using two different interfaces. The older interface was showing files under /sys/firmware/efi/vars, and this is […]

Debian v11 with codename bullseye is supposed to be released as new stable release soon-ish (let’s hope for June, 2021! :)). Similar to what we had with #newinbuster and previous releases, now it’s time for #newinbullseye! I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bullseye before its freeze, […]

It all started with the big bang! We nearly lost 33 of 36 disks on a Proxmox/Ceph Cluster; this is the story of how we recovered them. At the end of 2020, we eventually had a long outstanding maintenance window for taking care of system upgrades at a customer. During this maintenance window, which involved […]

(Blogging this, since this is a recurring anti-pattern I noticed at several customers and often comes up during deployments of 3rd party repositories.) Update on 2021-02-19: clarified, that Signed-By requires apt >= 1.1, thanks Vincent Bernat Many upstream projects provide Debian repository instructions like this: curl -fsSL https://example.com/stable/debian.gpg | sudo apt-key add – Do not […]

We did it again™, at the end of June we released Grml 2020.06, codename Ausgehfuahangl. This Grml release (a Linux live system for system administrators) is based on Debian/testing (AKA bullseye) and provides current software packages as of June, incorporates up to date hardware support and fixes known issues from previous Grml releases. I am […]

Disclaimer: I started writing this blog post in May 2018, when Debian/stretch was the current stable release of Debian, but published this article in August 2019, so please keep the version information (Debian releases + kernels not being up2date) in mind. The kernel version of Debian/stretch (4.9.0) didn’t support the RAID controller as present in […]

Es ist schon ein Weilchen her, aber nachdem mich noch immer Leute darauf ansprechen: Auf den Grazer Linuxtagen 2019 (GLT19) war ich als Referent mit einem Vortrag zum Thema “Best Practices in der IT-Administration, Version 2019” vertreten. In dem 25-minütigen Vortrag geht es um die moderne IT-Administration und welche Best Practices es im Jahr 2019 […]

Debian buster is there, and similar to what we had with #newinwheezy, #newinjessie and #newinstretch it’s time for #newinbuster! One package that isn’t new but its tools are used by many of us is coreutils, providing many essential system utilities. We have coreutils v8.26-3 in Debian/stretch and coreutils v8.30-3 in Debian/buster. Compared to the changes […]