mikas blog

JFYI: The computer is my 12″ Lenovo X61s laptop. Disclaimer: no, that’s not my own 50" monitor. ;-)

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Die FrOSCon ist eine zweitägige Konferenz rund um die Themen Freie Software und Open Source, die am 25. und 26. August 2007 bereits zum zweiten Mal an der Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin bei Bonn in Deutschland stattfindet. Meine eingereichten Vorträge wurden angenommen und somit halte ich auf der FrOSCon einen Vortrag über grml – […]

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 […]

Gefunden im Zuge der Cisco VPN Client-Installation auf Windows XP:

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 […]

This is UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE of CyberTAN Inc. the contents of this file may not be disclosed to third parties, copied or duplicated in any form without the prior written permission of CyberTAN Inc. This software should be used as a reference only, and it not intended for production use! Found in HTML source […]

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 […]

Am 28.01.2007 habe ich eine grml-Userbefragung ausgeschrieben. Am 9. Juni habe ich dann die Evaluierung abgeschlossen und Mails an alle Teilnehmer geschickt. Die detaillierte Auswertung zur grml-Benutzerumfrage findet man im grml-Wiki. Warum ich das jetzt eigentlich schreibe? Weil es eine sehr interessante Erfahrung war. Aber mal von Anfang an…. Die erste Version von grml gab […]

Die PDF-Spamwelle dieser Tage hat wohl jeder Mailserver-Admin mitbekommen (siehe Heise: "Nach Bild-Spam nun PDF-Spam"). Ich habe das zum Glück sehr zeitnahe bemerkt und die Welle schon direkt am Mailserver unterbunden. Die Zahlen für die letzten 2 Tage auf einem einzelnen Mailserver sprechen für sich selbst: # grep -c ‘PDF-Spam detected’ /var/log/mail.log* /var/log/mail.log:1006 /var/log/mail.log.0:1272 Dieses […]

Mein Internetzugang über den Virtuellen Campus Graz (VCG) stinkt dank der Einführung eines Intrustion Prevention Systems (IPS) von McAfee seitens der TU Graz ohne Ende. Nicht nur diverse Ports, sondern auch jeglicher Bittorrent-Traffic und sogar das Tor-Netzwerk werden gefiltert. Das betrifft übrigens nicht nur den VCG, sondern (teilweise) auch die TU Graz als Ganzes. Man […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve installed python-2.5.1.msi on Windows using power user rights (in german: Hauptbenutzerrechte) and it works fine: Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>> Ok, let’s take a look at Twisted (an event-driven networking engine written in Python). There […]

It’s done. grml 1.0 is available. New features? Tons of them. 8-) 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 […]

docbook2odf is a toolkit that automatically converts DocBook to OASIS OpenDocument (ODF, the ISO standardized format used for texts, spreadsheets and presentations). Conversion is based on a XSLT which makes it easy to convert DocBook->ODF, ODT, ODS and ODP as all these documents are XML based. This piece of software is pretty rocking for example […]