mikas blog

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 […]

Fsck you, FIP.

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 […]

void die_if_kernel(char *str, struct pt_regs *regs) { static int die_counter; int count = 0; /* Amuse the user. */ printk( ” \\|/ ____ \\|/\n” ” \”@’/ .. \\`@\”\n” ” /_| \\__/ |_\\\n” ” \\__U_/\n”);   — arch/sparc/kernel/traps_64.c

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

If you ever notice a device like that on your Linux system: # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 8 MB, 8388608 bytes 8 heads, 32 sectors/track, 64 cylinders Units = cylinders of 256 * 512 = 131072 bytes Disk /dev/sda doesn’t contain a valid partition table … then the scsi_debug kernel driver is present. To get […]

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 […]

% id -r mika id: cannot print only names or real IDs in default format % id -ugG mika id: cannot print “only” of more than one choice

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 […]

I hope you know the comics of xkcd and abstrusegoose about Unix time. Unix time? Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing points in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. It is widely used not only […]

Board Info: #2 Manufacturer: “[snip]” Product: “To be filled by O.E.M.” Version: “To be filled by O.E.M.” Serial: “To be filled by O.E.M.” Asset Tag: “To Be Filled By O.E.M.” Type: 0x0a (Motherboard) Features: 0x09 Hosting Board Replaceable Location: “To Be Filled By O.E.M.” Chassis: #3 Note: I snipped the manufacturer. Feel free to guess […]

I got a mail from Linux New Media telling me that they want me as jury member for the Linux New Media Award. The process is simple and for now they just ask me to send my nominations for the following categories: Outstanding Contribution to Open Source / Linux / Free Software Most Linux / […]

The advent calendar started with a Zsh tip, let’s end the advent calendar session with a Zsh tip: globbing. Globbing is like pattern matching. When running ‘ls *.txt’ you’re using globbing. But the globbing feature inside Zsh is much more powerful. Quoting the H-Glob function (“help globbing”) of grml’s Zsh configuration: % H-Glob / directories […]

Nagios is a well known and established Open Source Monitoring System. It’s flexible, easy to deploy and a tool every sysadmin should know how to deal with. I guess most readers of my blog use or at least know Nagios so I’ll keep this blog entry short. But one tip for sysadmins managing Debian systems: […]