mikas blog

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!

You might be aware of GRUB’s loopback option for booting an ISO, I wrote about it in Boot an ISO via Grub2 more than a year ago. A few months ago Goswin von Brederlow came up with this idea: grml functions great as rescue system. So it would be nice to have a boot entry […]

Update: Ulrich ‘mru’ Dangel suggested pdnsd as nice alternative to dnsmasq and Cyril ‘KiBi’ Brulebois pointed out, that it’s not necessary to invoke dnsmasq after fresh installation as it’s running by default then – I adjusted the text accordingly, thanks for the pointers! If /etc/resolv.conf doesn’t provide any nameserver entries glibc[1] will automatically initialize the […]

Finally I’m back from DebConf10 in New York. It was the first DebConf I attended and it was just great. Thanks a lot to all involved people for making DebConf such a great event. I had a big todo list for DebCamp and DebConf and managed to get a bunch of work done. Besides several […]

On each last Friday of July the annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is taking place. Matt Simmons organized a SysAdmin Day Meetup to celebrate this event in New York. If you’re in New York on 30th of July consider registering yourself (it’s free and takes just a few seconds). If you are participant of the […]

Last weekend (2010-07-02 – 2010-07-04) nine people met at the FAI developer workshop at Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. If you can’t remember: FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. The […]

From 2nd to 4th of July 2010 the FAI developer workshop will take place at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. FAI? FAI is the abbreviation for Fully Automatic Installation. It’s a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks […]

I love EtherPad for online collaboration in real-time. By today (14th of April 2010) new pad creation will be disabled at EtherPad.com. Being aware of that in advance and as the EtherPad software was open sourced recently friends of mine and I were working on providing a dedicated EtherPad setup. TitanPad was born! Quoting our […]

I’m working for a customer who’s using IBM blades. Remote access isn’t limited to e.g. SoL but also possible through a Remote Console feature using a Java applet. After migrating one of my 32bit systems to a fresh 64bit system I suddenly couldn’t use this Remote Console feature any longer. The error message was (leaving […]

Just booked my ticket for DebConf10. See you in New York.

Distrowatch, Heise, Pro-Linux, Symlink, Golem & CO already have the news: a new version of the Debian based Live system for system administrators has been released: Grml 2009.10 – Codename ‘Hello-Wien‘. One visible new feature is the new bootsplash which should lead you through the most important boot options. The new release features kernel 2.6.31.5 […]

Live-initramfs is a fork of Ubuntu’s casper for use within Debian. Nowadays several Debian based live systems are using live-initramfs to build an initramfs suited to boot live systems. Besides debian-live and all its users that’s at least Grml (and its derivates) and FAI. I’m maintaining live-initramfs for Grml – so I know the limitations […]

Now being an official Debian developer I’ve the possibility to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org for my Debian packages. But whereas I want to use that for all my official Debian packages I still want to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org for my grml related packages. I’m a lazy sysadmin and don’t want to manually adjust my changelogs depending on the […]

Since 2009-05-28 I’m an official Debian Developer. Thanks to all involved people. Special thanks to Gerfried ‘Rhonda’ Fuchs for being my advocate and a helpful package sponsor, to Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt for being a helpful package sponsor, to Christoph ‘Myon’ Berg and Bernd ‘bzed’ Zeimetz from the frontdesk and to Marc ‘he’ Brockschmidt for being […]

With grub2 you can directly boot an (iso9660) ISO using its loopback option. This is great because it provides another nice rescue scenario – for example when using grml (the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins). You no longer need to extract kernel and initrd from the ISO to be able to boot it using […]

Alright, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA as Lenny has been released. Time for a Debian unstable unfreeze party! 8-) What does the new stable release bring for system administrators? I’ll give an overview what news you might expect when upgrading from Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codename Etch (released on 8th April 2007) to the current version Debian […]

grml release delayed through a CBS commedy series. News at 11<Rhonda /> There we go: there’s a new grml release (you know, the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users). The release with codename Schluchtenscheisser and version number 2008.11 is available in different variants. The 32bit versions grml, grml-medium and grml-small as well […]

For the last few days I’ve been in the city Badajoz in region Extremadura of Spain at the FAI developer meeting. Check out the Linex Euronews Video at youtube to get a short impression of Linux in the region. Lessions learnt: debcommit is great, it generates a commit message based on new text in debian/changelog […]