Debian Administration

A new security advisory has recently been released relating to the Debian openssl package, and whilst most security updates are not news-worthy this one is. Read on for a brief overview of the problem.

Do you ever find yourself in need of a generic TCP proxy? Do you wish you could do it with netfilter? Do you want to proxy a connection to a given port on a given IP address to a completely different port on a totally different host or network?

I wanted to use the "find" command on a FTP space but it's not possible to use this command with any "normal" FTP client. So, I looked for a solution.

When I set out to build my first system using Logical Volume Management I was surprised by the lack of information about how LVM relates to more "traditional" disk-level partitioning. There were plenty of articles with examples of how to use 'vgcreate' and 'lvresize' and no short supply of advice and white noise from the forums, but there was very little practical information about what the various strata of LVM were actually for or how they related to each other. In fact I was well into my search for information before I figured out where to put the file system.

I have set up a Debian etch system with apache2, perl etc, but I cannot get apache to actually execute my scripts..

nsupdate is the little-known brother of nslookup. It is used to make edits on a dynamic DNS without the need to edit zone files and restart the DNS server. If you have declared a zone dynamic, this is the way that you should be making edits.

The upcoming version of OpenSSH (4.8p1 for the GNU/Linux port) features a new configuration option : ChrootDirectory. This has been made possible by a new SFTP subsystem statically linked to sshd.

I have successfully used the method below to configure the change_ldappass plugin of Squirrelmail to perform password strength checks using cracklib. I made a few assumptions, but it should be easy to adapt it to your own situation.

This HOWTO will describe how to install BackupPC and how to create a simple backup using backuppc. BackupPC can offer a nice solution for both simple and complex backups.

pam_mount is "a Pluggable Authentication Module that can mount volumes for a user session". It is used to automatically mount a network share or volume when a user logs in, and unmount it when the user logs out sshfs is a FUSE filesystem that allows mounting a directory using the SSH sftp subsystem.