mikas blog

In the last few days several IT events published recordings/slides from their events. I haven’t had the time to take a closer look at the material yet but there might be some gems among them so I thought it’s worth spreading the word: Devopsdays Rome/Italy 2012: videos from the talks PuppetConf 2012: videos from the […]

Since I’m not aware of a ready-to-go solution, this issue once again came up at a company where I’m doing Jenkins/CI consulting for and the solution involves some trickiness you need to be aware of I’m hereby documenting it. If you have a build pipeline inside your Jenkins setup you might have so called upstream […]

Far away from Rosetta Code, but that’s what Frank and I came up with when explaining 100000₂: Guile: guile <<< \#b100000 guile -c ‘((@@ (ice-9 format) format) #t “~d~%” #b100000)’ Racket: racket -e ‘#b100000’ Ruby: ruby -e ‘puts “100000”.to_i(2)’ Python: python -c ‘print int(“100000”, 2)’ Perl: perl -e ‘print 0b100000’ Zsh: zsh -c ‘print $((2#100000))’ […]

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!

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 […]

Remember my LART of the day? It looked like: % cat foo.c int main() { return 0; } % gcc foo.c foo.c:1: fatal error: can’t open /tmp/ccxgyEhb.s for writing: Permission denied compilation terminated. Congratulations to sunckell and Bernd for guessing the right answer. Additionally to the blog comments (which I delayed through moderation to give […]