Debian Administration

Thinking Disk Encryption give you more peace of mind? Then think again. It's well known that "fail to plan" means "plan to fail". But when comes to Disk Encryption I did not see any reasonable planning on disk failure, even though I've googled extensively.

After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code named "Wheezy").

There are many times when having access to a queue is useful when you're developing projects and code. These days there are several available queueing daemons available, and here we're going to look at one of them, beanstalkd.

This site was previously hosted upon a single machine, and was recently moved to a cluster instead. This broke the search interface which had to be reworked and this article describes how the new site-search was implemented.

According to the most recent update from the project we should be seeing the next stable release of Debian GNU/Linux in early May.

Recently I was hit be a problem which was ultimately caused by a failure to run a cron-job. Here I'm going to document the three most common means for failure that I know about, in the hopes of avoiding them in the future.

This article describes the setting up of PECL Taint module for PHP5 in Debian Squeeze.

Many people use SSH keys for password-less logins, and the increase in security that keys provide over (traditionally weaker) passwords. But few people seem to realize that you can also restrict logins to known-good IP addresses, via that same mechanism.

Several years ago, I implemented a centralized syslog-ng server for our Linux servers, switches, routers and firewalls. It worked very well, but I ran into situations where I would not be in front of my laptop but I wanted to be notified of something coming through.

For the past nine years this site has been hosted upon a single dedicated server, graciously donated by my employer Bytemark. Over time it has been upgraded, but despite that it has become apparent that a single-server wasn't sufficient, unless it was a huge server - so with that in mind I've recently redeployed this site in a mini-cluster.