Debian Administration

Many articles tell us about about initial setup of IPv6 and are completely silent about what to do next. Thus, I wanted to share my own experience.

With modern filesystems securely deleting files isn't always easy, but one approach which stands a good chance of working is to write random patterns over all unused areas of a disk - thus erasing the contents of files you've previously deleted.

Recently there was a message posted upon the debian-user-german mailing list asking if there is a way to create BIND-compliant DNS-Updates with regulars dyndns-clients from routers. The Idea behind this is to get rid of dyndns.org services and provide an independent way to maintain dynamic dns entries for boxes without a static ip-address without the need of dyndns providers. The goal was to create a text file which could be used as input for nsupdate with cron to run it frequently.

I have got e.g. two servers with Apache and Postfix and a virtual IP (from heartbeat-1). Well, heartbeat is working well and it is simple to deal with complete server outages, but how can I configure heartbeat, so that it also switches the server, if one of the above services fail?

After much trial and error, I have a Debian Lenny x86_64 server with apache2, php5, and connectivity to an Informix database server. Here are the steps I went through. Much of this information I found at http://devzone.zend.com/article/4290.

I have a laptop that travels with me to work as well as being used at home. I have a number of network CIFS mounts that I like to have available when I am at home, so I have them set to "auto" in /etc/fstab. When I am at work, I use a Mobile Broadband card to connect to the Internet. When at home, I typically use Ethernet.

Many of us are familiar with the use of Apache for hosting websites. It might not be the fastest webserver but it is extraordinarily popular, extremely flexible, and a great choice for most people. However there are times when it can struggle, and placing a proxy in front of it can be useful.

This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline.

Adding searching facilities to websites makes it a lot easier for finding content. When sites are dynamically constructed it is often simple to update the code to perform the searching in the application, but for sites constructed of static pages using an indexer such as namazu can give you a great interface in very short space of time.

According to Debian policy, limits for both UID and GID numbers (User IDs and Group IDs) are a maximum of 65535. Is there a way of increasing this limit?