Although its not /. i am proud to declare this my first post. Don't expect too much but sometimes i felt i needed to write something i had on my mind and the burden to really sit down and put up a whole webpage was just too much. Some thoughts and interesting points already gathered so probably there'll be a peak post time the next days. This blog will be bilingual German | English wherever i'll see fit.

Nachdem mein Vater und Buchautor einiger Reiseberichte seine Webseite überarbeitet gewünscht hat habe ich mich auf diesen Weg begeben und mal wieder so einiges über CSS gelernt. Einfach mal einen Text rechts neben das Bild so das selbiger nicht neben folgende oder vorangegangene rutscht, und selbiges auch noch funktioniert wenn der User seinen Font klein oder gross gestellt hat war dann doch bastelei.

Das Ergebniss ist hier zu sehen: http://seloh-verlag.de/buecher.html

Da fahre ich letzten Winter so zur Arbeit und entdecke wie Städtische Angestellte entlang eines Fahrradweges Bäume Pflanzen. Schön denke ich - Etwas gegen den Klimawandel tun - Landschaft begrünen. Erst ein paar Tage später habe ich entdeckt welch ein Schwachsinn dort wieder läuft. Bäume unter die T-Com Oberleitung pflanzen um sie in 2 Jahren umzuhauen weil sie bei Sturm drohen an die Leitung zu schlagen? Ich denke man kann Geld besser ausgeben.

Zur Flammenmühle, Bokel, Rietberg

I am taking care on ~360 Debian machines at work. Those are still running Woody so i had a look on how to upgrade them automatically. Things to do would be:

• Upgrade woody -> sarge -> etch
• replace lilo by grub but take care on serial console
• replace handcraftet by debian kernel
• switch to udev
• repartition and resize2fs the last partition (/opt) to max disk
• switch from rdist to cfengine2 for config distribution

The most important part - Try to not break those machines as they are spread across germany in remote locations. The first thing i did was an inventory which machine had which Board, CPU, Disksize, Memsize and kernel type. I ran through all steps to upgrade a machine and manually noted the commands necessary. I'll report back which issues arise.

One of the first problems to stumple upon is - How do i install/dist-upgrade without user interaction. The debconf part is easy - Just call apt-get dist-ugrade with DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive. But then you still get asked on whether you want the config files to get replaced which is dpkg's fault. There is a dpkg option to either take all new configs --force-confnew or to take all old config --force-confold. Now put everything together:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
apt-get \
-o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" \
--force-yes \
-fuy \
dist-upgrade

If all packages would be nice this would be the solution. There are still packages which do everything on their own. Have a look at bind. It heavily complains even with this setup that /var/named exists and is non-empty. Another issue with bind is that the upgrade from bind to bind9 on etch tries to create a user bind. With my setup this fails because i am running libnss-ldap and the local machine may not create users in the ldap. So the first thing to do is to purge bind, disable ldap by changing nsswitch.conf and later to the reverse.

"The most important part - Try to not break those machines" i said in #1 - Sir - We lost Nuernberg.

After reproducing it on my desk i found an interesting "grub" bug. All machines are currently equipped with lilo and i wanted to upgrade to grub. So - you issue an apt-get install grub then you need to replace the mbr and write a config. When you first issue an upgrade-grub you are boned. It will write a hd(0,0) as the root partition. When you grub-install /dev/hda first everything is fine and it'll detect the correct root partition.

While playing with the upgrade procedure i thought of an fast image based machine recovery. It seems partimage will only be able to cover single partitions not full disks including partioning.

I was watching "Linus talking about git" while getting interrupted. I'd like to watch the video continuing at 40:48 but i can't seem to skip forward in the youtube flash player? YouTube FFWD anyone ? It seems you can only skip in the range the player already loaded onto your machine.

Ich denke mal so hat die abstimmung zur Onlinedurchsuchung, Biometrischen Reisepass, Vorratsdatenspeicherung, Grosser Lauschangriff etc ausgesehen.

I was cleaning my room and found two machines i just kept because i needed to make a backup before dismantling. I powered the first up and found i needed an AT (not PS/2) Keyboard and i still had loads of them. The machine came up and greeted me. The filesystem was on a 250MByte SCSI Disk connected via an Adaptec AHA1542. It hadnt been checked for 1255 Days. It had last been powered up on 29th Sep 2004 and the .forward in my own homedirectory was dated 15 June 1999. lspci showed 3 PCI Devices, none of them beeing an extension card. /proc/cpuinfo told me i was using an Authentic AMD K5. The second showed an SCSI disk on an AHA2940 Wide Bus which was reported as not ready. After hitting the disk with a screwdriver i heard it spin up. After booting it had massive problems detecting the PCI devices in there so i decided to just dismantle and not care about the backup any longer.

All this hardware felt very familiar and i would now declare myself an Oldtimer.