stratus and the swirl

Debian testing (wheezy) keyboardless install

2012-03-18T02:27:00.002-03:00

I couldn't find an end-to-end document online about this just bits and pieces here and there. Let me describe how to install Debian testing (wheezy) without a keyboard using an USB flash drive and ssh.

I've got an HP Microserver a month or so ago and this is the step by step of my second install. The first one was also keyboardless but didn't involve an USB flash drive to bootstrap. I've used tftpd and dhcp from my laptop, but forgot to capture the notes to make a blog post. Shame on me.

Here's what you need:

A machine that will boot from USB. (HP Microserver comes with USB, Net and Disk boot order by default);
USB flash drive (>=256MB, mine is 1GB);
Machine with an ssh client to answer d-i's questions;
A DHCP server in your network.

The last two requirements are optional for hardcore preseeders. If you don't know what I mean. You aren't one of them. :)

Here's the step by step to install using SSH:

Download the right debian installer boot image. Pay attention to "amd64" here since your architecture might be different. - http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/amd64/daily/hd-media/boot.img.gz

Gunzip boot.img.gz.

Transfer the image to the USB flash drive using `dd if=boot.img of=/dev/<tokendev>`. It will give you a few files in the USB flash drive. It's like you are mirroring what's in boot.img into it. Syslinux will be there.

Download an ISO image - http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/. I've got netinst. Pay attention again to the architecture (amd64).

Mount the USB flash drive.

Copy the ISO image as is to the root directory of the USB flash drive. Using cp, yeah.

At this point you have all that you need to do a regular install using an USB flash drive and it's kinda of well documented. Well, we still need to change it to make it work without a keyboard and give you the ability to ssh into the installer.

Create a preseed.cfg in the root directory of the USB flash drive containing the following:

d-i netcfg/get_hostname string HOSTNAME
d-i netcfg/get_domain string DOMAIN
d-i anna/choose_modules string network-console
d-i network-console/password password INSERT_A_PASSWORD_HERE
d-i network-console/password-again password INSERT_A_PASSWORD_HERE

Edit syslinux.cfg in the root directory of the USB flash drive to look like this:

default netinst
prompt 0
timeout 5
label netinst
menu label netinst
 kernel linux
 append auto=true vga=normal file=/preseed.cfg initrd=initrd.gz priority=critical

Umount the USB flash drive.

Boot your new machine using the USB flash drive.

d-i should do its thing and show and only stop to show you the screen pointing out that you can ssh as installer@<ip>.

ssh from another machine as user installer to <ip>. Remember you've provided the password in the preseed.cfg above. You will be all set to install from there.

My wishlist to the d-i hackers out there:

A boot-ssh.img.gz with the syslinux.cfg and preeseed.cfg above. In this case, it would be much more trivial to document in the installer manual how to use such a great feature.

Google+ and your data

2011-07-12T20:46:00.002-03:00

Let's make it clear: Your data is yours and in Google+ official announcement there's the following "You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, ...". John Goerzen is wrong.

I can understand people having problems to use a product during its field trial and demanding features. I won't sit and watch people spreading FUD in bold before asking though.

Last, but not least, the following link is easily visible in the Settings and is also listed in the Help pages:
https://plus.google.com/settings/exportdata

Gooooogle!

2010-09-06T18:01:00.000-03:00

We will celebrate Independency Day here in Brazil tomorrow (the year was 1822 for those into world history). I took the time to visit Belo Horizonte and meet a few googlers I don't see in a while. The cool part is that Rodrigo and his wife Ellen are also in town. We (me and Rodrigo) used to work in the same team at Google here in Belo, he's now living in Zurich.

I would like to let you know that I'll be rejoining Google in a month or so!

For those out of the loop: I quit Google San Francisco a few months ago to get back to Rio de Janeiro in order to assist my family with some complicated issues. They were all sorted out and Google rehired me! How cool is that?

I'm glad to be part of Google Site Reliability Engineering again and looking forward to meet all the Debian Developers in Mountain View and San Francisco. I've met Andy and a few others already. Please stop by and say hi!

Frans Pop

2010-08-31T18:05:00.000-03:00

It feels like it was yesterday that I was talking all things d-i with Felipe (faw) and Otavio during the last International Free Software Forum and discuss d-i without mentioning Frans Pop and Joey Hess at least a couple of times is definitely not the same thing.

Otavio convinced me to help and I promptly synced with him and Daniel Baumann to deliver an alpha quality syslinux-installer udeb; that was during debconf a bit after the forum, that they've all attended and I couldn't.

I feel I can't let it pass without a post, now that we've put out a notice about our loss. RIP Frans. :/

Dell Mini 10, now what?

2010-01-16T23:49:00.000-02:00

Dear lazyweb, I bought a Dell Mini 10 and am curious on how and if you use it for some sort of Debian development.

I would like to use it in an almost stateless setup (think installed, but usb stick would do) to browse things and have a few git/svn repositories to build small packages.

It seems there are some issues with the Xorg driver for this -- sbo. Thoughts?

Living in San Francisco

2009-07-05T17:00:00.005-03:00

For those who care--No, I'm not dead or anything. I've just relocated twice (or thrice, depending on how you see these things) in less than 2 years and that involved way more trouble than I can tell you.

I've been living in San Francisco for two months now and things started calming down a bit. The next steps are clear and the good news is that they involve Debian. I miss #debian-*, the MLs and the whole mess. Oh, and last but not least--debconfs. Cool, huh?! Peace!

slack roles!

2009-01-11T02:05:00.003-02:00

Just uploaded some very rough slack roles in github to be used with slack. If you want to give a pull-only configuration management system a try, slack may be useful for you. It is also part of Debian for a while and may make Lenny, thanks to Andrew Pollock. He managed to package it before Alan Sundell allowed me to setup a project in code.google.com to keep it under a VCS.

slack advantage if compared with cfengine and puppet is that there's no need to have a daemon running in the client side and learn a new language to set things up. The disadvantage is that there is a central configuration in place but you can't manage from that central location (read push changes).

I plan to add more roles and polish the existing ones, I may split Debian/Ubuntu support in multiple branches as well. Let me know if you want to contribute or just want to know more about slack.

Let's wrap it up. Slack is a configuration management system maintained in code.google.com using SVN. Slack has the concept of roles to work properly and slack as is in code.google.com comes with no roles. slack-roles in github tries to fill the gap for Debian. You may need to fork it for internal usage, but I want to provide fully functional templates.

ps: Yeah, I've a laptop named trinity. duh!

Debian Project 2.0 (rc bugs and site).

2008-12-21T14:23:00.003-02:00

The title of this post sucks, so that's up to you help me come with an alternative. It's also a bit sarcastic to remember that Debian is around for ages, Internet was smaller and poor, web wasn't a hit on the streets. Debian GNU/Linux is successful being an universal operating system. The question is: What's next? Lenny is the short term answer, but we can do more...

Do we really need to stop and discuss everything? Let's discuss everything yeah, but always do the fun work in parallel. Let's force ourselves to much higher standards.

Please remember that in many cases it isn't that easy to contribute with more than ideas when an alternative implementation requires additional privileges. Higher standards doesn't mean lock everything even more, no. It involves release the keys and make sure we can revert any changes that are clearly bad.

Flame a new installer idea (remember that? nobody does...) or initial code is easy. Give it some room and see what happens later... Ask yourself now: Do I have any privileges in Debian that may be forbidding people to help this project? Well, if you answered yes please post in your blog, come out on IRC and talk to others. Make sure you act as an useful bridge not as a blocker. If you don't have enough time, share your privilege with a secondary (hint: Maintain a package is a privilege).

I'm on vacation from my regular job and committed to help Debian full-time on the following tasks, if folks from the respective projects are interested, drop me a comment. Those who disagree, please keep working on whatever you are. It will be much more productive to us. There we go:

RC bugs - Do downgrades/removals from packages with less XXX users (as in popcon) now. Higher standards! I can't do that by myself since I have no access, if you are a release team member and is happy with that, we define the number and I prepare the list based on BTS.

Site - I would like to help the team working on the web site to split it in two. "current" and "legacy". current would be a very small one with content related to a few topics such as: Lenny, download, documentation, how to contribute and more. It would have a new UI (multiple languages yes), use XHTML or whatever the team feels ok. The key detail is that current would be www.debian.org on the day we release Lenny and after. current would have a link (or multiple links) to legacy website. People are free to cross-post current content to legacy website as well, but the best would be move from legacy to current.

I have some more ideas, but let's focus on a few things so I can deliver. release team and www, it's your turn now.

A new toy in town.

2008-05-10T20:13:00.005-03:00

Just a little teaser from the bulk uploader output (more to come soon)...

INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:45,529 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:45,552 bulkload.py] cdebconf
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:47,253 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:47,281 bulkload.py] cdparanoia
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:48,962 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:48,986 bulkload.py] cdrdao
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:50,719 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:50,742 bulkload.py] cdrkit-doc
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:52,435 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:52,458 bulkload.py] cgilib
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:54,207 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:54,230 bulkload.py] check
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:55,977 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:56,000 bulkload.py] checksecurity
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:57,733 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:57,763 bulkload.py] cheese
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:59,673 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:13:59,696 bulkload.py] chkrootkit
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:01,411 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:01,433 bulkload.py] chrpath
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:03,141 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:03,164 bulkload.py] cli-common
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:04,883 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:04,906 bulkload.py] cli-common-dev
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:06,678 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:06,701 bulkload.py] cloop-utils
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:08,450 dev_appserver.py] "POST /upload HTTP/1.1" 200 -
INFO 2008-05-10 23:14:08,472 bulkload.py] clvm

Google App Engine SDK

2008-04-08T10:22:00.002-03:00

Google App Engine - that enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications is out! Yes, there's Python involved and more to come. :-P

I did some contributions to App Engine before its launch and wrote an article about how to index your data using the bulk uploader in parallel. Yes, there's a really small search engine involved (ranking is up to you yet!).

Download the SDK while it's hot. Don't forget to read what the fuzz is about before you jump on conclusions.

There will be no year of Linux on desktop

2008-01-03T17:51:00.001-02:00

Ok, cool! Time to post again: Like these mega interesting random TOP 10 lists people prepare every December and January, some love to speculate if the current year will be or not the year of Linux on desktop.

Please permit me state the obvious and argue that there will be no year of Linux on desktop, like there was never a year for Microsoft Windows or one being prepared for Apple Mac OS X! It is a evolving process, as dumb as it sounds. In 20, 30 years for historic reasons, some will call the 90s the decade of Linux rise and I agree. I believe that some history books (books?) will not omit the Linux impact (including of course some other key open source software) on Internet availability for the masses.

Do people really believe that "the year of the linux" will be the one when it reach a bigger domestic user base than Windows? Great, what about Linux usage through Internet? It's Linux on desktop and on steroids including - get ready - portability and tons of buzzwords I can't even keep up with. Don't get me wrong, I care about Linux usage on the real hardware that end users are using at home and not only through the Internet but come on, let's stop running in circles.

Earth is closer

2007-10-06T16:45:00.000-03:00

The best sci-fi series for a while IMNSHO, Battlestar Galactica next and last season will start with a two-hours episode (razor) in november 24! Fortunately I'll be in USA. So say we all. :P

Google!

2007-09-05T11:56:00.000-03:00

I've just accepted an job offer from Google and I'm now moving from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte!

I would like to say thank you very much for those who helped me in the Debian project until now, you know who you are.

last.fm, git and more.

2007-08-02T20:54:00.000-03:00

Just subscribed to last.fm! I'm getting addicted to that site while I wait for some things and do some of the stuff I point out below.

I've been working on to move some of my stuff into git and in a new sort of workflow to interact with other VCS - bzr and svn basically. I feel like cleaning up the $HOME.

I'm waiting for some new hardware to arrive at home, including thin-clients! Actually I'm low on i386 and amd64 CPU power, there's just my powerpc laptop and a cheap i386 around with tons of unused disk space.

I hope to resume my work on d-i-g (debian-cd replacement), get.Debian.net and Debian Desktop any time soon. There's still pending changes that should be reviewed by debian-cd folks that I applied during debconf. In terms of Debian Desktop tasks we're ok, except for swfdec that I would like to introduce for tests. We've enough time for the artwork, one area that I've been investigating if we could do something really big, we'll see. Looks like we will have artwork contest at art.debian.net for a debian-moreblue update (default in GNOME, KDE and Xfce) anyway. Stay tuned!

Believe in me, I know about patience and that's all. :-)

Happy sysadmin day and AFD turns 20

2007-07-27T13:32:00.000-03:00

Happy BOFH^W sysadmin day for you! For those who aren't sysadmins, don't ask stupid questions for him/her today. Come on, just give a gift and enjoy the reaction.

By the way, Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction (AFD) turned 20, six days ago so real, raw, unique! Unlike autotuned crap all over the place that we hear today from non musicians... "But Appetite was also among the last classic rock records to be mastered with vinyl in mind, to be edited with a razor blade applied to two-inch tape, to be mixed by five people frantically pushing faders at a non-automated mixing board. "We used classic instruments and classic amps," says the album's producer and engineer, Mike Clink."

Brazilian plane carrying 174 crashes in Sao Paulo

2007-07-17T20:29:00.000-03:00

It's really confusing and we don't know all the details on what happened yet. What I know is that I went to Belo Horizonte from Rio and back yesterday (in a difficult flight with really bad weather) on one of the tam's airbus. I feel very bad about all that sad news. :/

The flight cited on the title was from Porto Alegre - where the International Free Software Forum takes place to Sao Paulo - the biggest city in the country.

In a totally unrelated event, one of the two airports in Rio de Janeiro (the smaller) is closed due to a fire incident, with no victims AFAIK. We've the international airport here (Rio) where it seems that the flights are being rerouted.

More information at: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1726359820070717

get.Debian.net

2007-06-21T17:38:00.000-03:00

I've a Toy Story to tell you today and to make a long story a short one: debian-br is proud to announce the birth of a new baby during debconf 7, smile and say hello world to: get.Debian.net

If you don't want to figure out by yourself which one of the hundreds images (ISOs) available is the best for you to install Debian GNU/Linux. We do our best with get.Debian.net to figure out that automagically. You just need to use one of these javascript enabled browsers - yeah, nothing is perfect.

What it does?

List the best images available to your architecture based on your browser information
List Win32 loader for those browsing the web site using Windows
get.Debian.net/bittorrent gives you link for torrents
Make Debian looks more sexy. Good enough, Sam? :-P

TODO

Use GeoIP for mirror selection - code in place, need list of mirrors
i18n support
List Live CD image where possible (i386 only?)
Add get.Debian.net/kde, /xfce and /gnome support
Figure out how to include usb and other images on the 1-click soup

Download Debian: http://get.debian.net/
Download Debian using Bittorrent: http://get.debian.net/bittorrent

Special thanks to faw and valessio.

Echoes from debcamp

2007-06-17T12:19:00.000-03:00

ltsp: The pkg-ltsp team uploaded the shiny new ltsp 5 (5.0.8debian2). It works way better than previous releases and has default desktop environment as a perfect combo. I can't wait to do even more integration work between the two adding officially a 'ltsp server' task for those use testing installer images. In other words, server/thin|fat-clients support out of the box with sound and media (through ltspfs) support.
ltspfs: The pkg-ltsp team also uploaded a new ltspfs for ltsp media support (see above).
simple-cdd: Vagrant did a simple-cdd demonstration, stuff worked quite well and some time after the demo we uploaded a new simple-cdd version for sid - 3.0.2. Basically bug fixes and more documentation, now also including a man page. Go burn your own Etch images or custom Debian distribution as it should be.
dig: The debian-cd next gen development is going quite well, but I believe we're still some weeks far from a upload to sid. The code base is good, but it was missing important features I thought were there when I started working on. Well, doing a test install now, we'll see.

The Debian Day!

2007-06-16T12:33:00.000-03:00

yay, today is the Debian Day and for those not here with us in Edinburgh you can enjoy some of the cool stuff online:

Debconf 7 website:
http://debconf7.debconf.org

IRC:
irc.debian.org - #debconf, #debconf-uppertalks, #debconf-lowertalks, #debconf-upperbofs, #debconf-lowerbofs

Live Streams:
http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000/

Download and Install Debian (I recommend CD or DVD multi-arch, yes it will be installable on your regular PC, ibook and even on that shiny new amd64 server your company bought):
http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

Use Debian Live:
http://live.debian.net/etch-builds/current/i386/

Join Debian - Yes, we're also recruiting! :-P
http://www.debian.org/devel/join/

Congrats to the organization team! :-) debian/rules

debcamp updates - round III

2007-06-14T18:08:00.000-03:00

simple-cdd: During lunch Vagrant agreed we need a symlink from simple-cdd to build-simple-cdd, I've added it into my branch with some other minor changes and we will include that stuff in our next upload.
simple-cdd: After dinner Enrico told Vagrant about a simple-cdd demonstration and I said we could demo a 'merge' of both desktop and gnome-desktop tasks in a simple-cdd image containing just this new desktop profile, shrinking intentionally the list of packages. I'm sure people will be impressed how easy it's; the bonus point is learn more about the underrated tasksel. Stay tuned! :-)
d-i-g: I've a new branch just for the mirroring support, Otavio and I figured out that dp-m lacks proper multiple architecture support but I'll keep working on mirroring support on the 'dp-m' branch while I solve other problems and add new features on master and help Otavio add multiple arch support into dp-m. Lots of work. Python volunteers are welcome. git repository is at: git clone http://people.debian.org/~stratus/git/d-i-g.git
pkg-ltsp @ debian: You can say we've reunited here, me, vagrantc, otavio and pere. Vagrant is installing one Ltsp server and since we're short in time today - venue closing @ 11pm, probably we will have a lot more fun tomorrow.
git and stgit: I'm in love with both tools, I blame Otavio that introduced me to them.
people: Tomorrow I and faw will be changing room and in a few days all the brazilian people will be reunited here. I can't wait to see the canteen really crowded with us and the rest of the Debian people attending debconf. See you all and have a nice trip!

There's a lot more bits but I can't remember everything, oh I've also met siretart. :-)

debcamp updates - round II

2007-06-13T17:10:00.000-03:00

simple-cdd: Ignoring it for a while to work on debian-cd next gen, a.k.a d-i-g.
d-i-g: git clone http://people.debian.org/~stratus/git/d-i-g.git
debian desktop: wfm, but if doesn't for you and you're attending debcamp or will show up for debconf, please tell me what's broken for you
debcamp: It could be better if we had more people doing real Debian related work

debcamp updates - round I

2007-06-11T07:03:00.000-03:00

baggage: Arrived yesterday in the hostel, thanks Mark, Kevin and Felipe for the help.
people: Otavio Salvador is finally here with us in the hacklab.
simple-cdd: Figured out an easy way to cross compile images using my ppc machine.
simple-cdd: I'm now able to work on code cleanup and further modularization.
ltsp: Otavio came with one arm thin-client and suggested some ltsp related work.

Where's Vagrant? :)

I'm in Edinburgh, my baggage isn't.

2007-06-10T06:15:00.000-03:00

I arrived yesterday in Edinburgh for debcamp and debconf 7 after aprox. 14 hours and 3 flights from Brazil to Scotland (Rio->Guarulhos, Guarulhos->London, London->Edinburgh). The city looks really cool with a lot of interesting places to visit and the weather is ok for me until now. We're now in the main talks room, that's is a sort of hacklab at this moment too.

Unfortunately TAM and British Airways (they call each other partners) don't give me my baggage yet, at least I've my laptop and my friend Felipe (faw) to help me with essential stuff. Hopefully this problem will be sorted out really soon, so I can concentrate on real Debian related work.

See you!

Happy Birthday to me

2007-06-04T16:56:00.000-03:00

There's a lot going on behind the scenes and today is a good day to break the silence and inform you that I'll attend my second debconf! Hopefully, I'll have more good news soon, meanwhile, I'll enjoy my birthday with friends and wait for the key email message.

Microsoft violates free software patents

2007-05-14T01:47:00.000-03:00

Microsoft infringes on no fewer than 235 free software patents (open invention network and others), full list only if Microsoft publish its first stop spreading FUD. Don't blame me, it was Ballmer who threw the first chair!