mikas blog

On 10th of May 2015 my lovely wife has made me a lovely present again: welcome to our family, Johanna.

Continuing the #newinjessie game: Bernhard Miklautz, contributor to jenkins-debian-glue and author of jenkins-package-builder (being in an early stage but under active development to provide support for building RPMs, similar to what jenkins-debian-glue provides for building Debian/Ubuntu packages) pointed out that there are new tools related to RPM packaging available in Debian/jessie: mock: Build rpm packages […]

I wasn’t sure whether I would make it to Linuxdays Graz (GLT15) this year so I didn’t participate in its call for lectures. But when meeting folks on the evening before the main event I came up with the idea of giving a lightning talk as special kind of celebrating the Debian jessie release. So […]

Repeating what I did for the last Debian release with the #newinwheezy game it’s time for the #newinjessie game: Debian/jessie AKA Debian 8.0 includes a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics. The packages maintained within the Debian Forensics team which are new in the Debian/jessie stable release as compared to Debian/wheezy (and […]

For one of our customers we are using the Open Monitoring Distribution which includes Check_MK as monitoring system. We’re monitoring the switches (Cisco) via SNMP. The switches as well as all the servers support GBit connections, though there are some systems in the wild which are still operating at 100MBit (or even worse on 10MBit). […]

Business: Attended only four conferences (FOSDEM, Linuxdays Graz, DebConf and Flowcon) due to taking care of my child each Tuesday and Friday (so it wasn’t easy to attend conferences during the week, and weekends are usually family time for me nowadays) Home office/remote work: this year was very remote work and home office focused because […]

For a recent customer setup of Debian/wheezy on a IBM x3630 M4 server we used my blog entry “State of the art Debian/wheezy deployments with GRUB and LVM/SW-RAID/Crypto” as a base. But this time we wanted to use (U)EFI instead of BIOS legacy boot. As usual we went for installing via Grml and grml-debootstrap. We […]

On 22nd of October 2004 an event called OS04 took place in Seifenfabrik Graz/Austria and it marked the first official release of the Grml project. Grml was initially started by myself in 2003 – I registered the domain on September 16, 2003 (so technically it would be 11 years already :)). It started with a […]

Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers. I’m responsible for a docker setup with Jenkins integration and a private docker-registry setup at a customer and pre-ordered James Turnbull’s “The Docker Book” a few months ago. Recently James – he’s working for Docker Inc – released the first version […]

Kamailio is an Open Source SIP Server. Since beginning of March 2014 a new setup for Kamailio‘s Debian packages is available. Development of this setup is sponsored by Sipwise and I am responsible for its infrastructure part (Jenkins, EC2, jenkins-debian-glue). The setup includes support for building Debian packages for Debian 5 (lenny), 6 (squeeze), 7 […]

In a project I recently worked on we wanted to provide a jenkins-debian-glue based setup on Amazon’s EC2 for building Debian and Ubuntu packages. The idea is to keep a not-so-strong powered Jenkins master up and running 24×7, while stronger machines serving as Jenkins slaves should be launched only as needed. The project setup in […]

Problem description: One of my customers had a problem with their Selenium tests in the Jenkins continuous integration system. While Perl’s Test::WebDriver still worked just fine the Selenium tests using Ruby’s selenium-webdriver suddenly reported failures. The problem was caused by Debian wheezy’s upgrade of the Iceweasel web browser. Debian originally shipped Iceweasel version 17.0.10esr-1~deb7u1 in […]

Update on 2014-03-03: quoting Colin Watson from the comments: Note that this is spelled GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK=y in GRUB 2.02 betas (matching the 2.00 documentation though not the implementation; not sure why Andrey chose to go with the docs). Since several people asked me how to get such a setup and it’s poorly documented (as in: I […]

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 […]

2013 was a fantastic year for me. Following the real-life fork it was the first year of my daughter’s life. Whenever I heard people saying “oh, children are growing sooooo fast” in the past it felt like a lie for me, but seeing your own child grow I can just sign that, and it’s fantastic. […]

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!