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Archive for the 'Debian' Category

Booting ISO images from within GRUB2

Friday, January 7th, 2011

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 […]

Simple DNS in chroots

Friday, January 7th, 2011

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 […]

DebConf10: done

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

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 […]

Event: System Administrator Appreciation Day 2010 in New York

Friday, July 30th, 2010

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 […]

Report from FAI developer workshop 07/2010

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

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 […]

FAI Developer Workshop 2010

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

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 […]

EtherPad.com gone – long live TitanPad.com!

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

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 […]

Remote Console feature through Java applet failing?

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

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 […]

I am going to DebConf 10

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

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

Grml 2009.10 – Codename Hello-Wien

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

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 […]

Debian: considerations regarding redesign of live-initramfs

Friday, September 11th, 2009

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 […]

Directory specific shell configuration with Zsh

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

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 […]

Debian.Developer->add_member(“mika”)

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

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 […]

Boot an ISO via Grub2

Monday, May 25th, 2009

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 […]

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 codename Lenny – News for sysadmins

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

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 […]

Schluchtenscheisser!

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

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 […]

FAI developer meeting in Extremadura/Spain

Monday, September 8th, 2008

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 […]

Re: I am only mad on IRC

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Martin, sorry for calling you Madduck on the debian.ch-mailinglist. Luckily I didn’t use that name during our meeting in Zurich last week. *pfuh* ;) To take part in the pdo-game with my own name (being Michael Prokop ;-)): as many of you might know I’m known as Mika in the community. The name was invented […]

google hack for your desktop: keyword correct

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Do you know the situation where you just aren’t sure whether you are spelling a word the right way? If you know how to type the word pretty well, then a dictionary might work just fine. If you aren’t sure at all you might consider using Google’s ‘Did you mean’-feature. Check out a simple demonstration […]

Linux Live-CD grml 1.1 – Codename Skunk

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

It’s done, we have new releases of grml, the Debian-based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins and texttool users: grml 1.1 (32bit) – Codename Skunk grml64 0.2 (64bit) – Codename Schwammerlklauber grml-medium 0.1 (32bit) / grml64-medium (64bit) – Codename Pfuh It’s the first stable release being based on our new build-framework grml-live which itself is based on […]