general - 3

We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2011.12, code-named "Knecht Rootrecht"!

For detailed information about the changes between 2011.05 and 2011.12 have a look at the official release announcement .

This release brings a downsizing and cleanup: one flavour, two architectures. The new, smaller flavour has a 350MB ISO size target, while still delivering over 1.1GB of open source software relevant for system administrators!

Give it a try and download grml 2011.12-rc and report back to us.

Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and report back, so we can complete the stable release soon. If no major problems come up, the next iteration will be the stable release, which is scheduled for end of December.

Grml 2011.05 with codename "Just Mari", available in flavours grml, grml-medium and grml-small and all of them as 32bit and 64bit version has been released. The official release announcements providing all the relevant news are available at grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-2011.05. Issues regarding the releases can be found in the grml-wiki. Grab the ISOs from grml.org/download/.

daily.grml.org includes ISOs for the upcoming Debian release with codename "wheezy" (being Debian/testing nowadays). All daily ISOs starting with 18th of march also provide the brand new kernel 2.6.38-grml.

The workflow for grml-live distribution to the build server has been improved as well: once a day, right before the daily ISOs are being built, the build server automatically builds a Debian package based on the git tree of grml-live. This means all changes to grml-live.git end up on the daily ISOs on the next day without any manual intervention. The autobuilt packages are available at http://amd64.grml.org/grml-live-daily/.

We just released the new stable version 2010.12 with Codename 'Gebrüder Grml', available as all the different flavours: grml, grml64, grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small. The new features and changes are documented in the official release notes. You can download the ISO(s) from grml.org/download.

Happy new year from the Grml team!

Due to a server migration at our provider the grml.org website and a few services will experience an expected downtime, from:

until:

The affected services will be:

• http://grml.org/
• http://ml.grml.org/
• http://deb.grml.org/
• http://bts.grml.org/
• http://git.grml.org/
• http://paste.grml.org/
• jabber://jabber.grml.org

Please note that mails sent to any grml.org mailaddress will be delayed.

Not affected are the grml user mailinglist and the following services:

• http://wiki.grml.org/
• http://blog.grml.org/
• http://twitter.grml.org/
• http://twitter.com/grmlproject
• http://identi.ca/grml
• http://daily.grml.org/
• http://planet.grml.org/
• #grml IRC channel on freenode

Please notice that a mirror of the main website grml.org is available at http://grml.deb.at/grml-www/ and a mirror of the repository (http://deb.grml.org/) is available athttp://debian.netcologne.de/www.grml.org/deb.grml.org/.

If the downtime will be longer than expected we'll be providing updated information through the available channels (grml user mailinglist, twitter/identi.ca and IRC being #grml on freenode).

• new versions of grml-debootstrap, grml-live, grml2hd,... are available
• we've a working kernel 2.6.33, expect to find Debian packages in grml's repository within the next few days
• we managed to close more than 100 issues in our bug tracking system over the last week

On 7th of january we've had a developer meeting on IRC, mainly for updating our roadmap towards our upcoming Grml's releases and infrastructure. That's what development of the last weeks brought up:

• needsbuild: we've a new service on our project infrastructure to spot packages that are available for just one architecture (out of i386 and amd64) but missing for the other one. The service automatically builds the according package and notifies our build admins for inclusion of the package into Grml's Debian repository. Thanks for your work, formorer!
• grml-live features database layer: version 0.9.34 introduces an additional package named grml-live-db. The grml-live-db Debian package provides a simple way to put build information of grml-live into a database. By default you have to do nothing but install grml-live-db and during each invocation of grml-live you'll get an additional entry in the sqlite3 database /var/log/grml-live.db. If you want to customize the database logging and for further details check out the grml-live-db manpage. Version 0.9.35 with changes in FAI's config space layout to further simplify customization has been released as well.
• grml-quickconfig: the simple command line tool that's visible right after booting finished Grml to get fast access to some important and often needed grml-scripts has been redesigned. The new version is more flexible and supports proper customization. Upload of this new version as part of the new grml-quickconfig package will happen soon. Thanks for your work, Ulrich!
• We have a new and public accessible Grml developer mailinglist.

Summary: Grml gets more robust support for network booting.

Background information: A customer uses Grml for the deployment process of their systems. Grml isn't just used for the deployment but also as part of the netboot environment in the High-Availability (HA) setup running on IBM BladeCenter systems. The netboot setup is used for hardware inventory and to be able to replace bladesystems without the need for any manual configuration (implementing features of IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager using Debian/Linux). As being part of a HA setup the netboot setup should work no matter which server is unavailable or which network connection is broken. The software stack is redundant thanks to DRBD, Heartbeat& CO while the hardware stack itself is redundant due to the bladeserver infrastructure.

Problem description: If you have more than one network card (NIC) inside your system you might encounter problems with network booting as soon as the first/preferred NIC doesn't work. This is a common problem in netboot environments, usually solved by crude hacks and workarounds.

Solution: The last Grml release (2009.10) already invented the ethdevice= bootoption which allows you to specify a specific NIC for booting. I just extended ethdevice and its surrounding code so it is possible to specify multiple devices at once that should be configured. If you don't have any specific configuration all present NICs will be used for configuration via DHCP automatically. The resulting code is quite tricky because ipconfig of klibc-utils might fail in several situations. I just uploaded live-initramfs (1.157.4-1grml.01) to the grml-testing repository, the daily ISOs will provide the feature within the next few days as well.

Available bootoptions and behaviour:

• default bootoptions (grml's default, no specific settings): configure any present network interface automatically
• bootoption 'ethdevice=eth1': forces configuration of network device eth1 only
• bootoption 'ethdevice=eth0,eth1': try configuration of eth0 and eth1
• bootoption 'ethdevice=eth0,eth1 ethdevice-timeout=30': try configuration of eth0 and eth1 and raise timeout of configuration from default (being 15 seconds) to 30 seconds

Screenshot of netboot in action:

The new stable release version 2009.10 was just released: grml, grml64, grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small.

If you're interested in the main changes between rc1 of 2009.10 and the final stable release:

Changes in all flavours:

• updated grml2hd: bugfixes (adjust grub handling to support grub2, fix handling of custom bootoptions in bootloaders, fix grub support in non-interactive mode), added support for ext4 and some further minor updates/bugfixes
• updated grml2usb: integration of grml2usb-compat, updates for new features in grml-live, updated grml2iso (copy additional files to ISO, better support for grml2usb), support removal of bootoptions, use dynamic check for addons as current grml-small includes addons, support running on a generated grml2usb iso/directory
• updated grml-autoconfig: bugfixes (font-handling in non-framebuffer mode, handling of grml.sh)
• updated grml-debootstrap: added support for and use support grub2 by default, dropped $GROOT and modified usage of $GRUB, replaced vol_id command with blkid, use cdn.debian.net as default mirror
• updated grml-docs: update files for release
• updated grml-etc: bugfixes (eject handling)
• updated grml-tips: added further tips, updated existing ones
• updated grub-pc + grub-common (stable release)
• kernel 2.6.31-grml[64]: update to new version based on stable release 2.6.31.5

Changes in flavour grml/grml64:

• added ewf-tools, fio + guymager
• updated grml-live: direct integration of grub1, update and direct integration of grub2, gPXE, update of ldbsd.com
• updated firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-qlogic + firmware-ralink (feature update)
• updated grml-terminalserver: drop support for grub.img (fails to build with recent toolchains, use gPXE/etherboot instead), integrated grml2usb for generating pxeconfig
• dropped deprecated grml-terminalserver-data + ash packages

Changes in flavour grml-medium/grml64-medium:

• updated firmware-iwlwifi + firmware-ralink (feature update)
• updated grml-live: direct integration of grub1, update and direct integration of grub2, gPXE, update of ldbsd.com
• updated grml-terminalserver: drop support for grub.img (fails to build with recent toolchains, use gPXE/etherboot instead), integrated grml2usb for generating pxeconfig
• dropped deprecated grml-terminalserver-data + ash packages

Changes in flavour grml-small/grml64-small:

• added parted