mikas blog

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 […]

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 […]

Uhm yeah, so this shirt didn’t age well. :) Mainly to recall what happened, I’m once again revisiting my previous year (previous edition: 2020). 2021 was quite challenging overall. It started with four weeks of distance learning at school. Luckily at least at school things got back to "some kind of normal" afterwards. The lockdowns […]

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 […]

Mainly to recall what happened last year and to give thoughts and plan for the upcoming year(s) I’m once again revisiting my previous year (previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 + 2012). Due to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, 2020 was special™ for several reasons, but overall I consider myself and my […]

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 […]

Mainly to recall what happened last year and to give thoughts and to plan for the upcoming year(s) I’m once again revisiting my previous year (previous editions: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 + 2012). In terms of IT events, I attended Grazer Linuxdays 2019 and gave a talk (Best Practices in der IT-Administration, Version […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]