mikas blog

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 […]

Debian buster is there, and similar to what we had with #newinwheezy, #newinjessie and #newinstretch it’s time for #newinbuster! Update on 2019-07-26 22:55 UTC: Cyril Brulebois pointed out, that findmnt (find a filesystem) was available in Debian/stretch already as part of the mount package, updated the blog post accordingly One package that isn’t new but […]

Back in 2006 I started to write a tool called grml-debootstrap. grml-debootstrap is a wrapper around debootstrap for installing Debian systems. Using grml-debootstrap, it’s possible to install Debian systems from the command line, without having to boot a Debian installer ISO. This is very handy when you’re running a live system (like Grml or Tails) […]

Auf den Grazer Linuxtagen 2018 (GLT18) war ich als Referent mit einem Vortrag zum Thema “Best Practices in der IT-Administration, Version 2018” vertreten. In dem 25-minütigen Vortrag geht es um die moderne IT-Administration und welche Best Practices es im Jahr 2018 gibt. Es gibt den Vortrag als Videomitschnitt auf YouTube sowie in verschiedenen Formaten auch […]

Am Dienstag (20.03.2018) findet das nächste Treffen der Infracoders-Graz statt. Ich wurde eingeladen einen Vortrag zu halten und werde zum Thema “Best Practices in der IT-Administration” referieren. Was: Vortrag zu “Best Practices in der IT-Administration” Wann: Dienstag, 20.03.2018 um 19:00 Uhr Wo: Aula X Space, Georgigasse 85, Graz Eintritt frei

It all started with a tweet of mine: I received quite some feedback since then and I’d like to iterate on this. I’m a puppet user since ~2008 and since ~2015 also ansible is part of my sysadmin toolbox. Recently certain ansible setups I’m involved in grew faster than I’d like to see, both in […]

The Debian stretch release is going to happen soon (on 2017-06-17) and since our latest Grml release is based on a very recent version of Debian stretch I’m taking this as opportunity to announce it also here. So by the end of May we released a new stable release of Grml (the Debian based live […]

Debug packages include debug symbols and so far were usually named <package>-dbg in Debian. Those packages are essential if you’ve to debug failing (especially: crashing) programs. Since December 2015 Debian has automatic dbgsym packages, being built by default. Those packages are available as <package>-dbgsym, so starting with Debian/stretch you should no longer look for -dbg […]

Repeating what I did for the last Debian releases with the #newinwheezy and #newinjessie games it’s time for the #newinstretch game: Debian/stretch AKA Debian 9.0 will include a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics. The packages maintained within the Debian Forensics team which are new in the Debian/stretch release as compared to […]

We’re coming closer to the Debian/stretch stable release and similar to what we had with #newinwheezy and #newinjessie it’s time for #newinstretch! Hideki Yamane already started the game by blogging about GitHub’s Icon font, fonts-octicons and Arturo Borrero Gonzalez wrote a nice article about nftables in Debian/stretch. One package that isn’t new but its tools […]

Recently we had a WTF moment at a customer of mine which is worth sharing. In an automated deployment procedure we’re installing Debian systems and setting up MySQL HA/Scalability. Installation of the first node works fine, but during installation of the second node something weird is going on. Even though the deployment procedure reported that […]

Digitaldialog ist eine Veranstaltungsreihe der Steirischen Wirtschaftsförderung SFG. Am Dienstag den 29.11. findet der Digitaldialog zum Thema Privacy statt. Ich wurde eingeladen an der Podiumsdiskussion teilzunehmen und freue mich auf interessante Fragen aus dem Publikum. :) Weitere Informationen zum Event gibt es auf der SFG-Website und im Event-Flyer (PDF). Datum: Dienstag, 29.11.2016 ab 16:00 Uhr […]

At DebConf 16 I was working on a systemd backport for Debian/jessie. Results are officially available via the Debian archive now. In Debian jessie we have systemd v215 (which originally dates back to 2014-07-03 upstream-wise, plus changes + fixes from pkg-systemd folks of course). Now via Debian backports you have the option to update systemd […]

DebConf 16 in Capetown/South Africa was fantastic for many reasons. My Capetown/South Africa/Culture/Flight related lessons: Avoid flying on Sundays (especially in/from Austria where plenty of hotlines are closed on Sundays or at least not open when you need them) Actually turn back your seat on the flight when trying to sleep and not forget that […]

Open Source Data Center Conference (OSDC) was a pleasure and great event, Netways clearly knows how to run a conference. This year at OSDC 2016 I gave a talk titled “Continuous Integration in Data Centers – Further 3 Years Later“. The slides from this talk are available online (PDF, 6.2MB). Thanks to Netways folks also […]