Grml Blog

Debian based Linux Live system

New Grml developer: Christian Hofstaedtler

Christian Hofstaedtler officially joined the Grml team as developer.

Announce: Expected downtime of grml.org and further grml services on 2010-09-09

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

9th of september 2010, 22:00 CEST / 20:00 UTC until:

10th of september 2010, 9:00 CEST / 7:00 UTC The affected services will be:

Please note that mails sent to any grml.org mailaddress will be delayed. Not affected are the grml user mailinglist and the following services:

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).

Kernel 2.6.35-grml available

Thanks to excellent work by Gebi the squashfs-lzma issue for the new kernel could be solved. Now I’m proud to be able to announce a full-featured kernel 2.6.35-grml[64] which is available from the Grml grml-testing repository. grml-live 0.11.0 is available as well, featuring support for kernel 2.6.35-grml. The new squashfs-lzma patches in kernel 2.6.35 aren’t using the openwrt style format any longer but instead use the official on disk layout from mainline. That’s why a new squashfs-tools package is required to properly support kernel 2.6.35-grml[64]. This package is available as squashfs-lzma-tools4. All you’ve to do to get a kernel 2.6.35-grml[64] based live system is upgrading to grml-live >=0.11.0, install squashfs-lzma-tools4 and grml-live will take care of the rest automatically for you. For further details regarding the current state of squashfs-lzma in Grml please have a look at the official grml-live documentation. BTW: The current daily ISOs feature the new kernel version already, so give it a shot while it’s hot! :)

Event: Grml at FrOSCon 2010

Several Grml team members will be present at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin/Germany on August 21st/22nd 2010. We will have some gadgets like Grml USB pens with multiboot setup of the Grml release (32 and 64-bit), coffee cups,… So make sure to visit us, grab some CDs and USB pens while they are hot, and share your experience with Grml. See you at FrOSCon!

Grml 2010.04 shipped with LinuxUser 7/2010

Grml release 2010.04 is shipped on the DVD version of the german LinuxUser magazine, edition 07/2010.

Grml article in freiesMagazin 06/2010

The german magazine freiesMagazin provides an article about Grml in its current edition 06/2010. Check out the article in the freely available magazine at www.freiesmagazin.de/freiesMagazin-2010-06.

Event: Grml Talk in Dornbirn/Austria

Grml Developer Ulrich Dangel will give a german talk about Grml on 10th of June at the Net Culture Lab (NCL) in Dornbirn (Bertollini - Haus, Marktstrasse 4, 5. Stock, Dornbirn). The talk will cover Grml and its possibilities for data rescue and networking debugging as well as an overview about the powerful and extensible boot process. Grml tools like grml2usb, grml-terminserver and grml-live as well as the powerful and flexible default shell Zsh will be shown. You will have the possibility to get some Grml CDs with the current release 2010.04 Grmlmonster as well as multiboot USB keys (32 and 64bit).

Grml 2010.04 released

We just released the new stable version 2010.04 with Codename Grmlmonster, available as all the different flavours: grml, grml64,grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small.

Event: Grml at Linuxdays Graz 2010

Several Grml team members will be present at Linuxdays in Graz on Saturday, April 24th 2010. If you ever had any questions - this is the time to contact us in real life! :-) Thanks to data rescue specialist Attingo (AttingoDatenrettung) we can offer free Grml CDs to every visitor. The CD contains the upcoming version 2010.04 of Grml, codename Grmlmonster. We also have Grml USB pens with multiboot setup of the Grml release (32 and 64-bit), posters and even coffee cups. Project leader Michael Prokop will give a talk about Deployment and Disaster Recovery with Grml. Make sure to visit us, grab some CDs and USB pens while they are hot, and share your experience with Grml. For people not familiar with the shell and the console based workflow Sven Guckes will give a workshop about console programs using Grml for it. 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.

First release candidate of Grml 2010.04 available

We just released the first release candidate of Grml 2010.04 which features kernel 2.6.33-grml[64] and provides several new and nifty features. Check out the official release notes for all the glory details. As usual the ISOs can be downloaded from the ‘devel’ directory of the mirrors listed on grml.org/download/.

Results from developer meeting

We had a developer meeting in Graz on thursday and friday. We were working towards a new stable release:* 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

BTW: Some Grml developers will attend linuxdays in Chemnitz/Germany on 13rd and 14th of march. We don’t have our own booth but you might find us around the Debian booth. Hope to see you there!

recent development news

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.

More robust network booting

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:

Screenshot of netboot in action

Grml goes microblogging

Now, the Grml project has accounts on both Twitter (@grmlproject) and identi.ca (@grml). They will be used to publish Grml related announcements, news and links. Tips related to Zsh, console programs and Grml itself will be part of the regular posts as well. The program used to post grml tips is available in ourgit repository. If you have any suggestions for this service or any additional tips and/or packages we should mention feel free to drop us a mail to twitter (at) grml.org or create a bugreport in our bugtracking system. Now make sure to follow the Grml project ontwitter and/oridenti.ca! BTW: Grml developers can use these accounts to send announcements & messages as well. For detailed instructions have a look at http://twitter.grml.org.

new stable version: grml 2009.10

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