mikas blog

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 […]

Update: see LART of the day – the solution for the solution. % 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. Uh?! Ok, does the file exist? Do I have write permissions? gcc ok? % pwd /tmp % ls -lad […]

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 […]