Search Results: "Michael Prokop"

30 May 2011

Michael Prokop: Grml 2011.05 Codename Just Mari

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 of the way the release management worked out. I ve been the release manager for Grml since the very beginning, which turned out to be more than 6 years since the first stable release already. I developed grml-live as build framework based on FAI for generating a Grml and Debian based Linux Live system to streamline the build process. Anyway it was mainly me who managed the release chroots, doing the update management during release freeze, editing main web page etc. As I want to make the project as independent from myself as much as possible and to keep the Bus factor in balance we started to improve our project infrastructure so it s not just me who can do this kind of release management. As a result Grml core developer Christian Hofstaedtler became the release sergeant of this release. The release candidate version was even released without myself being available (the release happened behind my back during our marriage). Major work on the final stable release was also done by Grml core developers Ulrich Dangel, Christian Hofstaedtler, Frank Terbeck and Alexander Wirt and I m very happy about that. Kudos guys for all your work and all the hidden efforts going on behind my back. :) The details regarding the new Grml release are available in the official release announcement, get the ISOs from grml.org/download. I hope you enjoy the release as much as I do. Happy hacking!

5 May 2011

Michael Prokop: I am going to DebConf11

* Just registered myself for DebConf11, see you in Banja Luka.

21 April 2011

Michael Prokop: Report from FAI developer meeting 04/2011

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 and lasted until 22:00. We made 134 svn commits in those two days. The developer meeting was great, we got tons of stuff done:

6 April 2011

Gerfried Fuchs: The Canterbury Project

The Background If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the various community distribution websites. The main pages of them got replaced by a placeholder announcing the birth of The Canterbury Project. People started to wonder whether it is an April fool's prank or for real. This blog post is meant to shine a bit more light on it and address one comment received about it. If you go to the news item on the Debian site you'll get your answer about that it indeed was an April fool's prank. The idea for doing something in coordination with other distributions came to me when I thought about last year's (or was it already two year's ago?) prank that the various web cartoon sites pulled: they replaced their main page with the page of another cartoonist. My original idea was actually along that lines. So I started to dig up website contacts from different distributions, I was aiming at the big names in the community distribution sector. Given that my time is pretty limited these days with renovating the house we plan to live in soonish I knew I had to let in others in within Debian. I though didn't want to involve too many people, for several reasons: it should be a surprise to as many as possible, but more importantly, I didn't want to shy away other distributions by an overwhelming Debian involvement. That's also part of the reason why I didn't contact many Debian based distributions. So first contacts where made, a dedicated IRC channel used for coordination, and people involved joined in. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense. So there we were, having to think about text to put into two things: the news item and the replacement page itself. At this stage Alexander threw in a project name with a background that was adopted. Francesca started with an idea for the news item, I started to put quotes in and asked for ones from the other involved people that fit their distribution well. Klaas came up with a template for the replacement page that we tweaked. Fortunately we ended up being five distributions and the colors of the banner did match the distribution ones rather well (except for one, we had to tweak the color of one banner). The Credits We were all set, and actually everything went fine. And it definitely caught the attention. This blog post goes out in thanks to the following people: I hopefully haven't forgotten anyone. There surely were some more people involved in the other distributions, and I guess the named people weren't aware of all the ones involved inside Debian. Feel free to drop missing names in the comments. Addressing Feedback Finally, let me address one concern raised: someone claimed that the real joke with this prank was that we would consider collaboration to be a joke. Actually, the total opposite is the case here. That it was possible to pull it off should be proof enough that Collaboration Across Borders actually is possible. And the background information put into the news section of the replacement site is real. Also, my personal quote in the news item was meant dead honest. I do believe that DEX has a limited point of view and only tackles part of the problem. Unfortunately, for such efforts to really come to life it takes people with a really long breath and dedication to it. Efforts like the VCS-PKG and the Freedesktop Games effort are more or less stalled. Even though a lot of people do believe in stronger collaboration to be a good thing, the basis is not working out too well. I'm in the fortunate position that for some of the packages I maintain there is exchange between packagers from different distributions to avoid common troubles. If it can't be done in the big it should at least be tried in the small. I want to specifically highlight again one part of the updates in the replacement page: the CrossDistro track at this year's FOSDEM. This one was more than fruitful, on several levels. From what I've heard a lot of discussion happened besides the talks too, and connections got established. It doesn't sound unlikely like this might be done again next year. So again, thanks for enjoying this April fool's prank, thanks to everyone who helped to deliver it, and especially a lot of thanks to the people who this might have got thinking of possibilities to improve on the collaboration front!

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17 March 2011

Michael Prokop: Grml User Survey 2011 the results

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 quoting:
Also just a short overview but it seems that the most important reasons for using Grml are:
* Based on Debian
* Command-line interface
* Ships all necessary command-line tools
* Zsh
I personally consider the survey a big success for the Grml project. Thanks to all participants for your feedback.

17 February 2011

Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: Maximilian Attems, member of the kernel team

Maximilian, along with the other members of the Debian kernel team, has the overwhelming job of maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian. It s one of the largest package and certainly one where dealing with bug reports is really difficult as most of them are hardware-specific, and thus difficult to reproduce. He s very enthusiastic and energetic, and does not fear criticizing when something doesn t please him. You ll see. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Maximilian. Who are you? My name is Maximilian Attems. I am a theoretical physicist in my last year of PhD at the Technical University of Vienna. My main research area is the early phase of a Quark-Gluon Plasma as produced in heavy ion collisions at the LHC at CERN. I am developing simulations that take weeks on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (in the TOP 500 list). The rest of the lab is much less fancy and boils down to straight intel boxes without any binary blobs or external drivers (although lately we add radeon graphics for decent free 3D). Mathematica and Maple are the rare exceptions to the many dev tools of Debian (LaTeX, editors, git, IDE s, Open MPI, ..) found at the institute, as those are unfortunately yet unmatched in Free Software for symbolic computations. The lab mostly runs a combination of Debian stable (testing starting from freeze) for desktops and oldstable/stable for servers. Debian is in use for more than 10 years. So people in the institute know some ups and downs of the project. Newcomers like my room neighbors are always surprised how functional a free Debian Desktop is. :) What s your biggest achievement within Debian? Building lots and lots of kernels together with an growing uptake of the officially released linux images. I joined the Debian kernel team shortly after Herbert Xu departed. I had been upstream Maintainer of the linux-2.6 janitor project for almost a year brewing hundreds of small cleanups with quilt in a tree named kjt for early linux-2.6. In Debian we had lots of fun in sorting out the troubles that the long 2.5 freeze had imposed: Meaning we were sitting on a huge diverging monolithic semi-good patchset. It was great fun to prepare 2.6.8 for Sarge with a huge team enthusiastic in shipping something real close to mainline (You have to imagine that back then you had no stable or longterm release nor any useful free tools like git. This involved passing patches around, hand editing them and seeing what the result does.) From the Sarge install reports a common pattern emerged that the current Debian early userspace was causing lots of boot failures. This motivated me to develop an alternative using the new upstream initramfs features. So I got involved in early userspace. Thanks to large and active development team initramfs-tools got a nice ecosystem. It still tries to be as generic and flexible as possible and thus gains many nice features. Also H. Peter Anvin (hpa) gave me the official co-maintenance of klibc. klibc saw uptake and good patches from Google in the last 2 years. I am proud that the early userspace is working out fairly well these days, meaning you can shuffle discs around and see your box boot. Later on we focused on 2.6.18 for Etch, which turned out to a be good release and picked up by several other distributions. Only very much later we would see such a sync again. With 2.6.26 for Lenny we got somehow unlucky as we just missed the new longterm release by one release. We also pushed for another update very late (during freeze) in the release cycle, which turned out to semi-work as too much things depend on linux-2.6. For Squeeze 2.6.32 got picked thanks to discussions at Portland Linux Plumbers and it turned out to be a good release picked up by many distributions and external patchsets. The long-term support is going very well. Greg KH is doing a great job in collecting various needed fixes for it. Somehow we had hoped that the Squeeze freeze would start sooner and that the freeze duration would be shorter, since we were ready for a release starting from the actual freeze on. The only real big bastard on the cool 2.6.32 sync is Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form. They released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied. This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet generated the sharp and snide comments in press it deserves. Red Hat should really step back and not make such stupid management moves. Next to them even the semi-maintained Oracle Unbreakable 2.6.32 branch looks better: It is git fetchable. What are your plans and those of the kernel team for Debian Wheezy? Since 2.6.32 many of the used patches landed upstream or are on the way (speakup, Kbuild Debian specific targets, ..). The proper vfs based unionfs is something we d be looking forward. We haven t yet picked the next upstream release we will base Wheezy on, so currently we can happily jump to the most recent ones. There are plans for better interaction with Debian Installer thanks to generating our udebs properly in linux-2.6 source itself. Also we are looking forward to using git as tool of maintenance. We d hope that this will also allow for even better cross distribution collaboration. Concerning early userspace I plan to release an initramfs-tools with more generic userspace for the default case and finally also a klibc only for embedded or tuning cases. What do you like most in Debian? For one thing I do like the 2 year release cycle. It is not too long to have completely outdated software and on the other hand it gives enough time to really see huge progress from release to release. Also at my institute the software is is recent enough without too much admin overhead. For servers the three years support are a bit short, but on the manageable side. I do enjoy a lot the testing distribution. For my personal use it is very stable and thus I mainly run testing on my desktop and work boxes. (Occasionally mixing in things from sid for unbreaking transition or newer security fixes). Debian is independent and not a commercial entity. I think this is its main force and even more important these days. I enjoy using the Debian platform a lot at work thus in return this motivates me to contribute to Debian itself. I also like the fact that we strive for technical correctness. Is there some recurrent problem that hinders the progress of Debian? The New Maintainer process is a strange way to discourage people to contribute to Debian. It is particularly bureaucratic and a huge waste of time both for the applicant and his manager. It should be completely thrown overboard. One needs a more scalable approach for trust and credibility that also enhances the technical knowledge for coding and packaging of the applicant. NM is currently set in stone as any outside critics is automatically rejected. Young and energetic people are crucial for Debian and the long-term viability of the project, this is the reason why I d consider the New Maintainer process as Debian s biggest problem. Note from Rapha l Hertzog: I must say I do not share this point of view on the New Maintainer process, I have witnessed lots of improvements lately thanks to the addition of the Debian Maintainer status, and to the fact that a good history of contribution can easily subsume the annoying Tasks & Skills questionnaire. Another thing I miss is professional graphics input both for the desktop theme and the website. I know that effort has been done there lately and it is good to see movement there, but the end result is still lacking. Another trouble of Debian is its marketing capabilities. It should learn to better sell itself. It is the distribution users want to run and use not the rebranded copies of itself with lock-in sugar . Debian is about choice and it offers plenty of it: it is a great default Desktop. Linus Torvalds doesn t find Debian (and/or Ubuntu) a good platform to hack on the kernel. Do you know why and what can we do about this? The Fedora linux-2.6 receives contributions from several Red Hat employed upstream sub-Maintainers. Thus it typically carries huge patches which are not yet upstream. As a consequence eventual userland troubles get revealed quite quickly and are often seen there first. The cutting edge nature of Fedora rawhide is appealing for many developers. The usual Debian package division of library development files and the library itself is traditionally an entry barrier for dev on Debian. Debian got pretty easily usable these days, although we could and should again improve a lot more in this sector. Personally I think that Linus hasn t tried Debian for years. I have the feeling that the implication of the Debian Kernel team in LKML has been on the rise. Is that true and how do you explain this? Ben Hutchings is the Nr.1 contributor for 2.6.33. He also is top listed as author of patches on stable 2.6.32. Debian is not listed as organization as many send their linux-2.6 patches from their corporate or personal email address and thus it won t be attributed to Debian. There is currently no means to see how many patches get forwarded for the stable tree, but I certainly forwarded more then fifty patches. I was very happy when Greg KH personally thanked me in the 2.6.32.12 release. In the Squeeze kernel, the firmwares have been stripped and moved into separate packages in the non-free section. What should a user do to ensure his system keeps working? There is a debconf warning on linux-2.6 installation. It is quite clear that the free linux-2.6 can t depend on the firmware of the non-free archive (also there is no strict dependency there technically). On the terminal you d also see warnings by update-initramfs on the initramfs generation for drivers included in the initramfs. The debconf warning lists the filename(s) of the missing firmware(s). One can then apt-cache search for the firmware package name and install it via the non-free repository. The check runs against the current loaded modules. The match is not 100% accurate for special cases as the one where the device might be handled well by this driver without firmware, but is accurate enough to warrant the warning. The set of virtualization technologies that the official Debian kernel supports seems to change regularly. Which of the currently available options would you recommend to users who want to build on something that will last? KVM has been a smooth ride from day zero. It almost got included instantly upstream. The uptake it has is great as it sees both dev from Intel and AMD. Together with libvirt it s management is easy. Also the performance of virtio is very good. The linux containers are the thing we are looking forward for enhanced chroots in the Wheezy schedule. They are also manageable by libvirt. Xen being the bad outside boy has an incredible shrinking patchset, thus is fair to expect to see it for Wheezy and beyond. For many it may come a bit late, but for old hardware without relevant CPU it is there. Many tend to overstate the importance of the virtualization tech. I d be much more looking forward to the better Desktop support in newer linux-2.6. The Desktop is important for linux and something that is in heavy use. The much better graphics support of the radeon and nouveau drivers: The performance optimizations thanks to dcache scalability work and the neat automatic task-grouping for the CPU scheduler are very promising features for the usability of the linux desktop. Another nice to have feature is the online defrag of ext4 and its faster mkfs. Even cooler would be better scalability in ext4 (This side seems to have seen not enough effort lately). Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Hans Peter Anvin and Ted Tso are a huge source of deep linux-2.6 knowledge and personal wisdom. I do enjoy all sorts of interactions with them. Christoph Hellwig with Matthew Wilcox and also William Irwin for setting up the Debian kernel Team. Several Debian leaders including the previous and the current one for their engagement, which very often happens behind the scene. The Debian Gnome Team work is great, also the interactions have always been always easy and a pleasure. Martin Michlmayr and previously Thiemo Seufer do an incredible job in porting Debian on funny and interesting ARM and MIPS boxes. Debian has a lot of upcoming potential on this area. I m looking forward to other young enthusiastic people in that area. Colin Watson is bridging Debian and Ubuntu, which is an immense task. Michael Prokop bases on Debian an excellent recovery boot CD: http://www.grml.org. I d be happy if any Debian Developer would work as carefully coding and working.
Thank you to Maximilian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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10 January 2011

Michael Prokop: Grml User Survey 2011

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!

6 January 2011

Michael Prokop: Booting ISO images from within GRUB2

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 for it in grub instead of having to go look for the CD when needed. To make installing and updating simple it would be great if one could install this as a normal debian package which would register itself in grub (and maybe lilo too).
What a lovely idea: no need for a CD or USB stick as long as the bootloader and the harddisk are still working. Minimal manual intervention needed to keep it up2date and working sounds like the perfect rescue system. 8-) Now since end of 2010 a new stable version of sysadmin s favorite live system (AKA Grml 2010.12) is available and the great news is that we came up with two independent solutions known as grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot. Having shipped them to one of my customers already I d like to write some words about it and why you should also consider using it on all your systems where GRUB2 is available. grml-rescueboot uses GRUB2 and its loopback feature for booting. Grml as well as Ubuntu provide all what s needed out-of-the-box. If you re interested in the details check out Jordan Uggla s excellent Loopback.cfg webpage in the supergrubdisk wiki. The best about it: you can provide custom bootoptions automatically when booting Grml. For example just set CUSTOM_BOOTOPTIONS= ssh=grml2011 in /etc/default/grml-rescueboot and the Grml rescue system will automatically start the OpenSSH server with the specified argument as password for user grml. Of course you can use all the other nifty bootoptions like scripts/netscript/ to further customize your Grml rescue system. [A note to other distributions like Ubuntu: I'd be interested to establish a mechanism to pass kernel options for loopback boot in a standardized way, drop me a note if you're interested in this.] grub-imageboot uses GRUB2 and syslinux memdisk to boot ISOs and floppy images. It doesn t rely on the loopback feature but instead maps the ISO into the memory directly. This is great for Linux ISOs that can t and won t support the the loopback feature (and have everything inside their initrd so the ISO doesn t have to find itself during booting), like BIOS or firmware updates. Also for example FreeDOS and Alpharev are known to work just fine. But sadly memdisk ISO emulation doesn t work with all Linux systems, as documented in the syslinux wiki. The good news is that Grml supports the memdiskfind/phram/mtdblock approach out-of-the-box. As far as I know therefore Grml is the first Debian based live system supporting memdisk ISO boot, though my patches already went to the Debian-Live project so if you re using live-boot >=2.0.14-1 or >=2.0.12-1+grml.04 your live system should be able to boot via memdisk ISO emulation as well. Summary: If you want to boot a Linux system which supports loopback.cfg use grml-rescueboot as its a more powerful tool to boot Linux live systems like Grml and Ubuntu. If you want to boot non-Linux systems (BIOS-/Firmware-Updates/FreeDOS/ .) use grub-imageboot. Alright how do you deploy this solution? Just grab and install grml-rescueboot and/or grub-imageboot. To deploy grml-rescueboot (adjust $VERSION if you want to use another flavour): 
# choose Grml version:
VERSION=grml64-medium_2010.12
# create directory
mkdir -p /boot/grml
# download and verify ISO
cd /boot/grml
wget download.grml.org/$ VERSION .iso ,.md5 
md5sum -c $ VERSION .iso.md5
To deploy grub-imageboot: 
# choose Grml version:
VERSION=grml64-medium_2010.12
# create directory
mkdir -p /boot/images
# download and verify ISO
cd /boot/images
wget download.grml.org/$ VERSION .iso ,.md5 
md5sum -c $ VERSION .iso.md5
That s it! Now when running update-grub you should get something like: 
# update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.36-grml64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.36-grml64
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found memtest86+ multiboot image: /boot/memtest86+_multiboot.bin
  No volume groups found
Found Grml ISO image: /boot/grml/grml64-medium_2010.12.iso
Found memdisk: /boot/memdisk
Found iso image: /boot/images/grml64-medium_2010.12.iso
done
Voil , when rebooting your system you should see something like: Screenshot: grml-rescueboot The Grml Rescue System entry is what grml-rescueboot provides and Bootable ISO Image is what s provided by grub-imageboot. Just select the entry you d like to use, press enter and and you should get the bootsplash of the according ISO. BTW: I ve tested this with Ubuntu 10.10 too, grml-rescueboot works out-of-the-box with the Ubuntu ISO as well, it just doesn t support the memdisk ISO boot by grub-imageboot (yet). Tip: if you want to use grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot with the same ISOs without having them twice on the disk just point the configuration option IMAGES in /etc/default/grub-imageboot to the according directory (like /boot/grml). Note: if you re using the ext 2,3,4 filesystem on the partition that s being used for /boot please be aware that you need GRUB >=1.98+20100804-12 (newer version is already available in Debian/unstable and hopefully migrates to squeeze in time) or GRUB >=1.99~20101122-1 because of the INDIRECT_BLOCKS support, see #543924 for the details. PS: We think about providing grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot within official Debian. If you re interested in seeing integration support for other distributions as well please help and drop us a note.

Michael Prokop: Simple DNS in chroots

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 nameserver to the loopback address. This is nice for dealing with chroots without having to manually edit resolv.conf to get working DNS. Just install a basic DNS forwarder like dnsmasq ( apt-get install dnsmasq ) or if it s already on your box just start it ( /etc/init.d/dnsmasq start ). That s it. Now when chrooting into a system without an existing resolv.conf configuration it will give you a working DNS setup without any further work. PS: Grml ships dnsmasq by default and /etc/init.d/dnsmasq start or Start dnsmasq will work out-of-the box. In Ubuntu the dnsmasq package is available only through the universe repository but the dnsmasq-base package (providing e.g. the init script) is shipped by default, so replace the /etc/init.d/dnsmasq command with a simple dnsmasq there. [1] At least the [e]glibc versions provided on Debian and Ubuntu are known to provide this glibc extension. Other libc implementations like dietlibc and uclibc don t seem to provide it, so don t strictly rely on this feature but use it as the icing on the cake.

15 October 2010

Gerfried Fuchs: Open Source Projectmanagement

I wrote the following as a foreword for the great German book Open Source Projektmanagement that Michael Prokop wrote. Unfortunately the foreword didn't manage it in time into the book because of various circumstances. As I'm not a person to throw away already written material, here is it for your reading pleasure. Maybe it makes you consider obtaining a copy of the German language book for yourself!
The Whole is more than the Sum of the Parts When I first met Mika at a Linux conference some years ago I quickly noticed that he had potential. The way he asked questions and tackled issues did impress me. We did meet again at various events, joined forces in various projects and knew that the result would be good. Back in the year 2004 the only real live CD was Knoppix. It always was too sluggish for me because I never really liked KDE and also OpenOffice.org was too bloated for me. I was working since a year at an Internet provider, felt comfortable in the shell and was missing the tools on Knoppix which I used daily. Often enough the frustration with the status quo starts the best projects. And so I had the idea spinning around to start a sysadmin live CD. There was just one problem here: Exactly at the same time Mika had already started such a project. And I knew one thing: it would had been a lost race to compete with him in creating the better live CD. So I joined his team and helped with the best of my knowledge. The name choice alone showed that he was the right person for the job: Grml an expression of the frustration that even he felt which spoke directly to the heart of so many. But it wasn't just the chosen name that showed that Mika was the right person for the job of the project leader. It's always the sum of the parts, no matter how minor they might look. He quickly managed a first release and in light of that also created an event which was fitting for the release of the first version: the OS04 an Open Source event which managed to get Jon Maddog Hall as keynote speaker. Mika managed through his welcoming way to lure more people into helping out. The team grew over the years, further regular releases increased the fan base, not only through the creative release names which are surely one of the parts that helped create the success. He always was open to suggestions for new tools that helped to extend the project. The lived openness did lead among other things to the case that other live CDs started to use the grml build system. JUXlala 2.0 (the system for preschool kids) is just one example. Why do I write primarily about Grml, one could get subliminal advertising probably cheaper? I do it because Grml is an extremely good example of the experience revealed in this book. And even though every project is different, it is still exactly the sum of the parts that leads to the success of a project. And exactly these parts are covered in this book and can be considered for the project at hand and get implemented accordingly. Good luck whether in large or small.
Rhonda

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18 August 2010

Michael Prokop: DebConf10: done

Picture: Columbia University / New York 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 discussions, bug hunting, testing stuff and attending BoFs and talks the work that I could get done for Debian included: My talk about "State of Debian (based) Linux live systems in 2010" went pretty well according to the feedback I got (thanks for that), even though OpenOffice failed horrible once again (one completely broken line on one slide, several broken gradients on several slides in presentation mode, the presenter screen just didn t work at all, ). I just uploaded the slides of my talk (8.4MB, PDF), though they won t be useful without the talk but thanks to the awesome videoteam my talk is available as recording. On the next weekend (August 21st/22nd) you can meet me at FrOSCon/Germany where I ll be at the Grml booth and giving a talk titled "Gute Open-Source-Projekte bestehen aus mehr als nur Code" (english: Good open source projects are more than just code). BTW: What s a wiki? Say whaaaaaat?</insider>

30 July 2010

Michael Prokop: Event: System Administrator Appreciation Day 2010 in New York

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 Debian Conference in New York and are already hacking at the DebCamp you might want to join our group of Debian people who plan to show up, currently consisting of Paul Wise, Lars Wirzenius, Thomas Lange and myself. If you plan to join please ping me so we can show up at the SysAdmin Day Meetup together.

8 July 2010

Michael Prokop: Report from FAI developer workshop 07/2010

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 participants of the FAI meeting: picture of participants of the FAI developer workshop 2010 second row from left to right: Michael Goetze, Michael Prokop, Andreas Schuldei
first row from left to right: Sebastian Hetze, Manuel Hachtkemper, Thomas Lange, Mattias Jansson
missing on the picture: Thomas Neumann (left on sunday midday) and Stephan Hermann (only part-time) Friday afternoon started with getting to know each other, continuing with discussions all around FAI. On saturday we started to hack on FAI. * Between the hack sessions and discussions the attending people presented their FAI usage and approaches. Some notes from the presentations:
FAI Manager webfrontend / Stephan Hermann Stephan \sh Hermann presented his FAI web frontend which should be released under the GPL license in those days. The frontend uses qooxdoo whereas the backend is based on django, rpc4django and python-tftpy. Screenshot of FAI manager webfrontend A demo video is available at blip.tv. Currently Stephan is searching for a nice name for his FAI management tool please send suggestions either to him or to the linux-fai-devel mailinglist. Grml / Michael Prokop Grml is a Debian based Linux live system specially made for system administrators. Grml uses grml-live for building the ISOs, whereas grml-live itself uses FAI s dirinstall feature to build the live system. This provides the Grml team with a nice way to autobuild 18 ISOs per day, known as daily.grml.org. Mika also presented Grml s netscript bootoption and the ethdevice bootoption of live-initramfs which is useful for booting Grml/FAI via PXE. Host Europe / Michael Goetze Host Europe uses FAI for installing Debian and Ubuntu (32+64 bit) in the support center. They have ~20 FAI classes and use a Debian lenny NFSROOT as base for all deployed systems. Their main problems with FAI aren t related to FAI itself, but instead e.g. broadcom NICs with lack of support for it in Lenny s kernel. They are not using softupdate (yet) and currently use Kickstart for deploying CentOS but are working on deploying CentOS with FAI as well. LIS AG / Sebastian Hetze Linux Information Systems AG (LIS AG) are using FAI 3.2.17 and provide a luma and PyQt based GUI to their customers. They use DHCP, LDAP and DDNS for inventory, configuration and deployment. Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn / Manuel Hachtkemper The Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn uses FAI 3.1.8 and 3.3.5 for managing ~150 systems. They are automatically running softupdates every day, reporting how many hosts actually did run the softupdate and how many didn t run. The involved failogwatch tool supports two regex files, one for excluding specific hosts and the other one for grepping for known problems in the logs. Spotify / Andreas Schuldei + Mattias Jansson Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming service and the operating people at Spotify use FAI for deploying the systems. Currently they are using FAI 3.3.3 to deploy ~400 bare metal machines and ~150 virtualised machines. They have their class names in DNS using the txt/Text record entry. They are using a self written prepend_class script to manage dependencies between classes. University K ln / Thomas Lange Thomas uses FAI s trunk version (of course :) ), managing ~25 machines with less than 20 FAI classes. He s not using softupdates as Lenny s aptitude ignores the hold status of packages (this bug should be fixed for Squeeze). $COMPANY One of the big telecommunication providers in Germany uses FAI 3.3.3 for installing their bare-metal and virtual servers, providing Debian, Ubuntu and SLES. They are using Debian NFSROOT as a base for all systems as well and their main problems with FAI wasn t FAI itself but how to manage installation of virtual machines.
On Saturday evening we had a nice barbecue which included beer and K lsch *d&r*. ;) On Sunday we continued with discussions and development. Our work-log of the weekend: Important decisions made: We noticed that many FAI users implement their own way how to handle dependency management between classes, we will re-consider how we could provide such a mechanism through FAI s core. We also noted that it s important that any self-written scripts used within FAI are fully idempotent and users should be aware of this. Last but not least many thanks to the sponsors of the FAI developer workshop 07/2010! The workshop wouldn t have been possible without our generous sponsors, namely being:

22 June 2010

Michael Prokop: FAI Developer Workshop 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 to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. As the name states the workshop is targeted towards FAI developers. We the FAI developers want to get FAI into shape for squeeze, discuss pending issues like Ubuntu packaging, release management and of course meet in real life for networking and socializing. Our rough roadmap for the FAI weekend looks like this: Friday: Saturday: Sunday: Further details are available in the FAI wiki at http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/DeveloperWorkshopJuly2010. The meeting wouldn t be possible without sponsors so special thanks to: If you are interested in sponsoring the FAI Developer Workshop as well please contact FAI lead developer Thomas Lange.

14 April 2010

Michael Prokop: EtherPad.com gone long live TitanPad.com!

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 TOS / Privacy Info:
TitanPad was launched to provide an EtherPad setup which is unrelated to any commercial and political entities. Its goal is to offer a stable service through proper operating.
[...]
Now TitanPad is officially up and running and you re free to use it for online collaboration. Feel free to drop your feedback, questions and suggestions to our team via mail to support (at) titanpad.com.

6 April 2010

Michael Prokop: Remote Console feature through Java applet failing?

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 it for search engines and help other affected users): 
load: class vnc.VncViewer.class not found.
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: vnc.VncViewer.class
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.findClass(Applet2ClassLoader.java:152)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:303)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2ClassLoader.loadCode(Plugin2ClassLoader.java:447)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager.createApplet(Plugin2Manager.java:2880)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Plugin2Manager.java:1397)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Network is unreachable
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195)
	at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182)
	at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366)
	at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:525)
	at sun.net.NetworkClient.doConnect(NetworkClient.java:161)
	at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:394)
	at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:529)
	at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.<init>(HttpClient.java:233)
	at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:306)
	at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:323)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getNewHttpClient(HttpURLConnection.java:860)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.plainConnect(HttpURLConnection.java:801)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.connect(HttpURLConnection.java:726)
	at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1049)
	at java.net.HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode(HttpURLConnection.java:373)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.getBytes(Applet2ClassLoader.java:458)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.access$000(Applet2ClassLoader.java:46)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader$1.run(Applet2ClassLoader.java:126)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at sun.plugin2.applet.Applet2ClassLoader.findClass(Applet2ClassLoader.java:123)
	... 6 more
Exception: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: vnc.VncViewer.class
The error message might not be obvious at a glance and that s why I m writing about it actually. It s NOT the: 
load: class vnc.VncViewer.class not found.
why it s failing but instead the real reason for the failure is the: 
java.net.ConnectException: Network is unreachable
As you can read in Debian s Bug Tracking System in bug #560044:
Netbase has recently introduced the sysctl-setting
net.ipv6.bindv6only=1 in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf and this setting will probably be the default in squeeze. This setting breaks networking in java, and any traffic will always
result in a java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable .
To quote /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf:
When disabled, IPv6 sockets will also be able to send and receive IPv4 traffic with addresses in the form ::ffff:192.0.2.1 and daemons listening on IPv6 sockets will also accept IPv4 connections. When IPV6_V6ONLY is enabled, daemons interested in both IPv4 and IPv6 connections must open two listening sockets.
To work around this issue you can either execute the Java process through "java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true" or to change the IPv6 behaviour system wide execute "sysctl -w net.ipv6.bindv6only=0". To make this setting permanent across reboots adjust the setting inside /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf. After applying this workaround the Remote Console should work again.

3 April 2010

Michael Prokop: I am going to DebConf 10

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

2 November 2009

Michael Prokop: Grml 2009.10 Codename Hello-Wien

Screenshot of Grml 2009.10 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 with various patches and extra modules. We ve an automatic hostname configuration via DHCP & rDNS, improved network boot capabilities, extensive documentation to Grml s Z Shell features and configuration, support for GRUB2 and directory-specific Z Shell configuration. Amongst the new software packages are Google s stressapptest, btrfs-tools and guymager. A full changelog and release notes can be found at http://grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-2009.10/. As always, images for 32 bit and 64 bit x86 architectures are provided in the sizes grml (~700 MiB), medium (~200 MiB) and small (~100 MiB). They can be downloaded via HTTP, FTP, rsync and Bittorrent. Thanks to all the contributors for being part of this rocking release! *

11 September 2009

Michael Prokop: Debian: considerations regarding redesign of live-initramfs

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 of live-initramfs. Yes, it has some design flaws but upstream finally decided to take the time to redesign it. That s why I m posting this: I would like to see even more Debian based systems adopting live-initramfs (hello Sidux!). This would improve compatibility with regards to similar bootoptions and features as well as better cooperation among the teams. Of course this will be possible only if live-initramfs is capable of handling all the necessary customization and configuration tasks that different live systems require nowadays. So this are my current considerations regarding the redesign of live-initramfs: If you re interested in adopting live-initramfs in your distribution/system feel free to contact me (mika [at] debian.org). If you do have any further wishes for the redesign please let me know so I can forward them to upstream.

30 May 2009

Michael Prokop: Directory specific shell configuration with Zsh

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 type of package (especially since this might be error-prone) so I needed a generic solution. Grml s Zsh configuration (Debian package grml-etc-core >=0.3.71) provides a solution for Zsh (version 4.3.3 or later): based on directories you can set your own profiles. Demonstration: 
% cd /grml/git-grml
chpwd(): Switching to profile: grml
% echo $DEBEMAIL
mika@grml.org
% cd /grml/git-debian
chpwd(): Switching to profile: debian
% echo $DEBEMAIL
mika@debian.org
The configuration is pretty simple: 
# define profiles based on directories:
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/grml/git-grml( / /*)'       profile grml
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/grml/git-debian( / /*)'     profile debian
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/home/mika/Customers( / /*)' profile customers
# configuration for profile 'grml':
chpwd_profile_grml()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org
  export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="mika@grml.org"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="mika@grml.org"
 
# configuration for profile 'debian':
chpwd_profile_debian()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org
  export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="mika@debian.org"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="mika@debian.org"
 
# configuration for profile 'customers':
chpwd_profile_customers()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export TELEPHONE=[...]
  export MAIL=[...]
Kudos to Frank for implementing this lovely feature in grml s zshrc. Look for chpwd_profiles() in grml s zsh config for further documentation on this feature.

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