Philipp Kern's Debian blog

You might see a verification screen pop up on more and more Debian web properties.

If you are like me that you are installing machines with testing and then go and flip them over to the current stable for a while using APT::Default-Release, you might not be receiving all relevant updates.

20 years ago, I got my Debian Developer account.

debian.org's infrastructure now supports using Security Key-backed SSH keys.

When setting up your YubiKey you have the option to require the user to touch the device to authorize an operation (be it signing, decrypting, or authenticating).

As client certificates are on the way out and Debian's SSO solution is effectively not maintained any longer, I switched self-service buildd givebacks over to Salsa authentication.

I have voted putting Proposal F first, Proposal B second and everything else after Further Discussion.

Builds on Debian's build farm sometimes fail transiently.

I got tired of manually fetching installation images via either FTP or by manually transferring files to z/VM to test s390x installs.

Two s390x changes landed in Debian unstable today: A new version of zipl-installer that will infer the root filesystem to pass to the kernel using mapdevfs instead of enforcing a single DASD partition for it.

Two helpful CMS commands to know if the users on the z/VM host you connect to are managed using DIRMAINT: DIRMAINT PW: This will ask you for your current password and then for the new one.

If you try to install Debian on System z within z/VM you might be annoyed at the various prompts it shows before it lets you access the network console via SSH.

If you intend to buy the HP MicroServer Gen8 as a home server there are a few caveats that I didn't find on the interwebs before I bought the device: Even though the main chassis fan is now fixed in AHCI mode with recent BIOS versions, there is still an a…

It turns out that my recent woes with pbuilder were all due to libpam-tmpdir being installed (at least two old bug reports exist about this issue: #576425 and #725434).

Axel just said that PDiffs are really useful for stable because it changes seldom.

Did you notice that it was gone?

Due to the data loss I blogged about, I had to reverse engineer the encryption used by git-annex for its encrypted special remotes.

If you use LVM with Wheezy on a solid-state drive, you really want to install the latest lvm2 update (i.e. 2.02.95-6, which contains the changes of -5).

Am I the only one who's disappointed with the route Mozilla's taking and left wondering what the direction is?

The Free and Open successor to the Clonk computer game series OpenClonk is now available in Debian sid and Ubuntu raring: just use sudo apt-get install openclonk to install it (backports to Ubuntu precise and quantal can be found in the OpenClonk Releases…

I wondered how to properly maintain an OpenWRT installation that needs to track trunk for one reason or another.

We just sent out a new call for testing for the next point release of Debian Squeeze.

The IPv6 patch set for netcfg (part of debian-installer) has landed in Debian unstable.

I tried to continue netcfg's journey to support IPv6 in debian-installer.

With a current daily build of debian-installer you should now be able to install a VM with Debian s390x.