mikas blog

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 […]

So while testing Proxmox VE 3.0 RC1 I had the need to reboot the system into a kernel version different than the one being the default in the bootloader GRUB. “lilo -R …” worked fine in the past, but with GRUB it’s not as trivial on the first sight to get its equivalent. I remembered […]

Following up on the #newinwheezy game: Debian/wheezy is the first Debian release which ships packages from the Grml system. Grml became an official Debian Derivative and I’m very happy that three major projects of Grml found their official way into Debian: grml2usb: install Grml system / ISO to usb device grml-debootstrap: wrapper around debootstrap for […]

Debian/wheezy includes a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics. The packages maintained within the Debian Forensics team which are shipped with the upcoming Debian/wheezy stable release for the first time in a Debian release are: dc3dd: patched version of GNU dd with forensic features extundelete: utility to recover deleted files from ext3/ext4 […]

Linux is a great platform for dealing with all kinds of different file systems, partition tables etc. But one of the few annoying situations when working in IT forensics are Microsoft Windows dynamic disks, AKA LDM (Logical Disk Manager). Thanks to libldm’s ldmtool this is no longer true. A short demonstration from a real-life IT […]

I’ll be speaker at the Open Source Data Center Conference 2013 in Nuremberg/Germany on 17th and 18th April, talking about Continuous Integration/Delivery in the data-center. I was speaking at OSDC back in 2009 and very much enjoyed the conference – so I’m totally looking forward to OSDC 2013, hope to see you there!

jenkins-debian-glue is an open source project of mine which recently celebrated its first birthday and it’s time to finally write about it. jenkins-debian-glue allows you to build Debian and Ubuntu packages directly from the Jenkins continuous integration system. It retrieves package sources from a version control repository, adjusts debian/changelog (handle version number + mention changes […]

December, release time. I’m currently involved in the release management of three major projects and it’s not always about fun. So lets make it more fun: https://github.com/mika/commit-sounds

Revision one in the Subversion repository of the FAI project dates back to the 27th of June 2000. Over the last few months we were discussing the switch to Git. At the last FAI meeting we decided to finally switch to Git and I volunteered to drive the migration. Today I officially did the migration. […]

The “Directory specific shell configuration with Zsh” is a rocking feature I use in all my projects when working on the command line. I just created a screencast where I’m showing this feature in action, including its configuration: This embedded video doesn’t work for you? Try heading over to YouTube. Since its my first screencast […]

For a (german) talk I’ll be giving soon I was interested in a list of open source projects which use Jenkins. Jenkins is a great open source continuous integration server. I was wondering whether such a list exists but since it doesn’t exist yet I created my own and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of Hudson/Jenkins) suggested […]

Everyone loves stats, ok well – at least I do. I was doing some research with regards to package maintenance within the Debian distribution and since the results might be interesting for someone else – there we are. On 19th of August 2011 there have been: 16935 unique source packages in Debian/sid 9977 packages with […]

I was giving a skills exchange session about Zsh at DebConf 11. I wasn’t expected to prepare the session, but since there was no video projector available in the meeting room I started to work on some notes. Looks like I suffer from presentation driven development, so the notes turned out to become bigger than […]

i386 systems are dying off and therefore building 32bit Debian packages in 64bit environments is important if you still need packages for i386. For some recent projects I had to set up 64bit-only environments with the need to provide 32bit packages for i386 as well as according i386 Linux kernel packages. 1) Common Debian packages […]

Background: Lars Wirzenius was searching for a tool to create virtual disk images. Turned out I needed something similar to improve the automatic deployment process of a customer’s platform installation. Being the author of the mentioned grml-debootstrap tool I started to work on deploying virtual disk images using grml-debootstrap. As a result I just uploaded […]

I’m proud to be able to announce a new stable release of Grml, the Debian based Live system for system administrators. This release is a very special one for me. On the one hand of course because of the special release name “Just Mari”, being dedicated to my lovely wife. But it’s also special because […]

Just registered myself for DebConf11, see you in Banja Luka.

Last week a developer meeting of the FAI project took place in Cologne/Germany. Four core developers (project lead Thomas Lange and 3x Michael :)) met for two days to discuss and work on the FAI project. The first day (2011-04-14) started at 11:45 and lasted until around 21:15, the second day (2011-04-15) started at 11:00 […]

The results of the Grml User Survey 2011 are available. I strongly recommend any open source project to run such a survey. Besides gathering really interesting feedback it’s motivating for developers to read what people think about your product. Interesting facts for Planet Debian readers: With a leading 86% our users are Debian users. Further […]

Grml users out there: We are interested in getting your feedback so we can further improve Grml. We are also working on a webpage which lists happy Grml users and also some quotes and use cases. Now we need your help: Please provide your feedback and take part in Grml’s user survey!