Grml Blog

Great news. Now I'm part of the Robocup team "Mostly Harmless" at Graz University of Technology, Austria. I will be working on kernelstuff, building debian packages and doing hardware recognition using grml technologies. An embedded system will be used with hardware like a CAN Dongle, compact flash cards, WLAN, serial connection      and so on. This means I will work on grml as part of my studies at university at least for this semester.

Thanks to Mabu for his investigations!

I'm preparing the development release for the upcoming grml 0.5 release. As we have a kernel upgrade in this release (using 2.6.13-grml) and I'm still lacking hardware using SCSI-controllers for booting I request your help. If you have access to a computer which is able to boot via SCSI please help me. You just have to send me the file '/proc/pci' and which module is used for the device (if you don't know which one is used just send me output of 'lsmod' and the kernel configuration). Just drop me a mail (mika [at] grml.org), your help is appreciated!

We just have a developer meeting in Graz and Gebi wrote a script namend grml-vpn. grml-vpn is a program to establish encrypted communication channels in a network. We just tested it and it really rocks. :-) It's very easy to use, take a look at the usage example:

Gebi (root@gebi) starts grml-vpn on his laptop with key/passphrase 'test' and uses his and my ip for the encrypted communication channel:

root@gebi # grml-vpn -k test add 1000 192.168.1.104 192.168.1.101

I (root@mika) am using the same command line on my laptop:

root@mika # grml-vpn -k test add 1000 192.168.1.104 192.168.1.101

To demonstrate that it's working let's use IPsec's setkey command:

root@mika # setkey -D
192.168.1.101 192.168.1.104
        esp mode=transport spi=1000(0x000003e8) reqid=0(0x00000000)
        E: aes-cbc  d8e8fca2 dc0f896f d7cb4cb0 031ba249
        seq=0x00000000 replay=0 flags=0x00000000 state=mature
        created: Sep 22 15:15:02 2005   current: Sep 22 15:19:40 2005
        diff: 278(s)    hard: 0(s)      soft: 0(s)
        last: Sep 22 15:15:14 2005      hard: 0(s)      soft: 0(s)
        current: 1488(bytes)    hard: 0(bytes)  soft: 0(bytes)
        allocated: 12   hard: 0 soft: 0
        sadb_seq=1 pid=20148 refcnt=0
192.168.1.104 192.168.1.101
        esp mode=transport spi=1001(0x000003e9) reqid=0(0x00000000)
        E: aes-cbc  d8e8fca2 dc0f896f d7cb4cb0 031ba249
        seq=0x00000000 replay=0 flags=0x00000000 state=mature
        created: Sep 22 15:15:02 2005   current: Sep 22 15:19:40 2005
        diff: 278(s)    hard: 0(s)      soft: 0(s)
        last: Sep 22 15:15:14 2005      hard: 0(s)      soft: 0(s)
        current: 768(bytes)     hard: 0(bytes)  soft: 0(bytes)
        allocated: 12   hard: 0 soft: 0
        sadb_seq=0 pid=20148 refcnt=0

Now let's check whether it's really encrypted:

root@mika # ping 192.168.1.104
[...]
root@gebi # tcpdump
15:16:26.066885 IP 192.168.1.101 > 192.168.1.104: ESP(spi=0x000003e8, seq=0xa)
15:16:26.067040 IP 192.168.1.104 > 192.168.1.101: ESP(spi=0x000003e9, seq=0xa)

Bingo! :-)

I just implemented the code for running grml2hd in full automized mode. This means you can run:

# GRML2HD_NONINTERACTIVE=yes grml2hd

... drink some coffee and some minutes later - without any further interaction - you have a full functional linux system on your harddisk. Configuration of grml2hd is possible via /etc/grml2hd/config. You can even run pre- and post-commands to partition your harddisk automatically, run upgrades without interaction or whatever you like.

Now I will implement a bootoption 'grml2hd' which allows booting and installing grml without any further interaction right out of the box. This means it will be possible to set up a cluster of - let's say for example - 30 computers in a computer lab without any further interaction just via using grml with grml2hd and grml-terminalserver.

Hardware recognition of grml is quite stable. But there exist are some laptops which require deep woodo and magic to work as intented to. Some laptops provide additional hotkeys and specific resolutions which might not work right out-of-the-box. Therefore I just created the package grml-laptop:

grml provides a hardware recognition system right out
of the box. But some laptops provide special functions
like hotkeys and specific resolutions. This package
provides scripts for improving the grml system on such
laptops.
.
If you would like to see some more script(s) as part of
the package please contribute them!
http://grml.org/contact/

I will add a cheatcode laptop=... for using those scripts. So if you would like to see a script for a specific/your laptop: please contribute!

root@grml ~ # mount
/dev/hda1 on / type reiser4 (rw)
[...]

Yes, that's grml running on a reiser4-partition. I had some problems with lilo out-of-the-box but I'm looking forward to get a full working version into grml2hd. :-)

Good news! I just booted 2.6.13-grml with unionfs working. Thanks to Dave Quigley and the other unionfs-guys for their work! That was a very important step for current state of grml. Today (14th of september) we will have a developer meeting in Graz and a new devel-release should be available really soon now. There's only one release-stopper left, that's the new config-framework. People out there: we are coming closer to grml 0.5. :)

I just created a new tip named "Install (plain) Debian via grml" in the grml-wiki on the tips-page. It's a short (example) guide how to install a plain(!) Debian system via grml and debootstrap. I just tested it on my box using the current grml-small-snapshot. Rocks :-)

mika@grml ~ % uname -a
Linux grml 2.6.13-grml #1 Tue Aug 30 10:15:41 CEST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
mika@grml ~ %