Deploy Virtual Machines with Grml 2011.12 or Debian
The upcoming Grml release 2011.12 as well as Debian/testing and unstable ship an updated grml-debootstrap version supporting the installation of Debian not only into directories or hardisks but also into virtual images.
grml-debootstrap is designed to help you install complete Debian Systems. Typically if you install a Debian system with debootstrap you have to install the kernel, bootloader, /etc/fstab, ssh server, … yourself. grml-debootstrap automates this boring tasks and allows you to install Debian systems from within a running system within minutes.
Nowadays physical installations get less and less important but virtual installation gain importance. New servers are often run inside virtual environments like Xen, KVM or VMware. grml-debootstrap supports the automated installation of Debian into a virtualized environment without the need to use a preseeded installation medium. You can create a raw image with grml-debootstrap which boots per default with KVM and Xen. To boot the image file with other virtualization solutions you may have to convert the generated image with qemu-img
To install a plain Debian System into a raw image you can just run:
grml-debootstrap --password root-pw --vmfile --vmsize 3G --target ./squeeze.img
This will set the root pasword to root-pw, install openssh and the latest kernel package, create /etc/fstab with the necessary entries and configure the bootloader for your virtualized system.
If you want to customize or extend grml-debootstrap have a look at the manpage or look at the scripts and package definitions in /etc/debootstrap.
ATA over Ethernet and Grml
Update on 2011-12-20 by Grml team: while iscsitarget isn’t available any longer on Grml the new iSCSI implementation of the Linux kernel 3.1 is available and open-iscsi, targetcli and tgt are shipped with Grml. We don’t have any finished documentation for that yet, but if you know how to use targetcli (or optionally open-iscsi and tgt) you should have everything you need to provide a iscsi target with Grml 2011.12.
The upcoming Grml Release 2011.12 (check the changelog for our new Grml 2011.12-rc1) will not have any iSCSI support integrated due to build issues with dkms. Instead Grml 2011.12 will provide all the necessary tools to provide and access a ATA over Ethernet Device.
ATA over Ethernet, also known as AoE, is a protocol designed to access Block devices via Ethernet. Compared to iSCSI it does not work with IP but with Ethernet. Unfortunately this means that AoE is error-prone against Ethernet attacks like ARP spoofing. Do not use it in hostile enviornments. That being said AoE is quite simple to use.
Export a blockdevice
On the server side use vblade to export a block device:
vblade -m 11:22:33:44:55:66 160 2 eth0 /dev/sdb1
This will allow the host with the MAC 11:22:33:44:55:66 to access /dev/sdb1 via eth0, using the shelf and slot numbers 160 and 2. These numbers are arbitrary but should be unique within the network.
Access a blockdevice
On the client load the module “aoe”, or do
aoe-discover
You should find the device shared above as /dev/etherd/e160.2
I would like to thank to Christoph Biedl for providing this short and comprehensive documentation
First Release candidate of Grml version 2011.12 released
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 packages in Debian
The first fruits of our push packages to Debian effort are now available in Debian. Three often used packages from the Grml Team have arrived in unstable:
Packages overview for Grml Team
Note that these packages are no longer part of the grml-testing distribution.
To get the current version of any of these packages you must get them from Debian unstable instead. If this is a problem for you, please come to the grml mailing list.
Grml - new stable release 2011.05 available
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/.
First Release candidate of Grml version 2011.05 released
We are proud to announce the first release canidate of the upcoming version 2011.05, code-named “Just Mari”!
For detailed information about the changes between 2010.12 and 2011.05 have a look at: https://grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-2011.05-rc1/
As usual we have different flavours available: the 32bit versions grml, grml-medium and grml-small as well as the 64bit versions grml64, grml64-medium and grml64-small.
Known issues can be found at: http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=release_candidate
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 May.
Event: Grml at Linuxwochen Wien 2011
The Grml project will be present with a booth at Linuxwochen Wien 2011 during May 5th to 7th.
If you’re in Vienna and using Grml make sure to drop by!
Event: Grml at Linuxdays Graz 2011
Several Grml team members will be present at Linuxdays in Graz on Saturday, April 9th 2011. If you ever had any questions - this is the time to contact us in real life! :-)
Grml developer Christian Hofstaedtler will give a talk about Bare-metal deployment with Grml, as deployment is nowadays still an issue even in virtualized environments. Michael Prokop, project leader and founder of Grml, will give a talk about Opensource project management with some insights and hands on-stories about Open-source development and how to make a good Open-source project. Gerfried Fuchs, also a Grml developer, will talk about the Resources of Debian and provides an overview about several services for users of Debian as well as for users of other Distributions. Grml developer Ulrich Dangel will talk about DevOps, the DevOps movement, tools for DevOps and how Developer and Admins fit together .
Make sure to visit us, grab special Grml USB pens and Grml cups, and share your experience with Grml. We would really like to get in contact with you.
If you ever wanted to to get in contact with team members and users of Grml, learn something about console tools, simply meet interesting people or just listen to informative talks visit us and the other projects at Linuxdays in Graz and have a good time.
Grml kernels can't be installed with dpkg 1.16.0
dpkg 1.16.0 has entered Debian/unstable yesterday, and contains a change which currently prevents installation of Grml kernel packages. Quoting the changelog from dpkg version 1.16.0:
Do not allow versions starting with non-digit when doing strict parsing, warn otherwise.
We have opened a bug against dpkg (#620566) as we believe that the new behavior in dpkg is more strict than the current Debian policy.
Also, we are currently working on updated Grml kernel 2.6.38 packages providing a version number that won’t cause problems with dpkg 1.16.0 in the meanwhile.
Update: Updated kernel packages which work around the dpkg bug have been uploaded to the grml-testing repository.
The Canterbury Project
We are pleased to announce the birth of the Canterbury distribution. Canterbury is a merge of the efforts of the community distributions formerly known as Debian, Gentoo, Grml, openSUSE and Arch Linux to produce a really unified effort and be able to stand up in a combined effort against proprietary operating systems, to show off that the Free Software community is actually able to work together for a common goal instead of creating more diversity.
Canterbury will be as technologically simple as Arch, as stable as Debian, malleable as Gentoo, have a solid Live framework as Grml, and be as open minded as openSUSE.
Joining the the Canterbury Project Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz explained: “Arch Linux has always been about keeping its technology as simple as possible. Combining efforts into one single distribution will dramatically reduce complexity for developers, users and of course upstream projects. Canterbury will be the next evolutionary step of Linux distributions.”
Gerfried Fuchs, who gave a talk about Debian at last year’s openSUSE conference, said “While DEX (Debian Derivatives Exchange) might have been a good idea in principle, its point of view is too limited. We need to reach out further for true success.”
Robin H. Johnson, lead of the Gentoo Infrastructure team, in a panel of core Gentoo developers at SCALE9x: “I really hate compiling-induced downtime. I’ve been looking forward to installing packages with just a couple of keystrokes. By building on the efforts of other successful distributions, we can take the drudgery out of system maintenance.”
Michael Prokop, founder of the Grml live CD, can be quoted on the effort that “we managed to create a universal live build framework with grml-live. Our vision was always that it will be universally usable to further the spreading of Free Software.”
Last year’s openSUSE conference had the topic of “Collaboration Across Borders”. Klaas Freitag, a respected member of the community, mentioned that “the conference motto was set intentional and actually this is what I had in mind as a positive outcome for the conference.”
Please be notified that this announce is just the starting point, the necessary changes will happen in the upcoming days. You can use the #cbproject hashtag to give us your feedback on twitter or identi.ca.
Howto: Install Debian with an encrypted /home (German)
Ever wanted to install Debian with an encrypted home directory but you didn’t get along with the Debian installer? Grml to the rescue! Oliver Herold of F!XMBR wrote a nice article (in German) about using Grml to install Debian.
A new home
Welcome to blog.grml.org, the new home for the Grml development blog.
For various reasons we have moved away from our old blog hosting on supersized.org.
While old URLs continue to work, content on the old site won’t be updated and may cease to work at some point.
If you have subscribed our blog feed, please switch to this new feed:
- RSS 2.0 Feed: http://blog.grml.org/feeds/index.rss2
Also consider subscribing to Planet Grml, an aggregator of all individual Grml developer blogs, which also includes the Grml development blog.
Improved autobuilder support, daily ISOs for wheezy and kernel 2.6.38
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/.
Kernel 2.6.38-grml available
Only two days after Linus released Kernel 2.6.38 we already have it in the grml-testing repository! Besides the usual AUFS support it also features mainline’s squashfs XZ support, meaning no extra squashfs patch needed anymore to get support for LZMA (now known as XZ). Our build tool grml-live(8) already supports this kernel version and uses XZ compression with squashfs-tools >=1:4.2-1 by default. Please note: If you want to use current grml-live version (>=0.13.1) with older kernel versions than 2.6.38 don’t forget to point SQUASHFS_BINARY to the according mksquashfs binary and set SQUASHFS_OPTIONS accordingly. If you want to build older versions without any hassles you can still use old grml-live versions of course (as provided and shipped with each Grml release). Bottom line, XZ support in mainline (kernel >=2.6.38 and squashfs-tools >=4.2) will provide a better upgrade cycle for grml-live and the grml environment.
Results of Grml user survey 2011 available
The results of the Grml user survey are available. Thanks to everyone taking part in our survey!