Debian GNU/Linux System Administration Resources

Look before you leap into Disk Encryption

2013-05-28T16:42:09Z

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.

Debian 7.0, "Wheezy" released

2013-05-05T09:11:21Z

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

A brief introduction to the beanstalkd queue

2013-04-24T11:42:51Z

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.

Writing a simple indexer and searcher with Lucy::Simple

2013-04-22T09:34:29Z

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.

The next release of Debian GNU/Linux is due soon ..

2013-04-19T09:39:51Z

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

So, your cronjob did not run?

2013-02-21T09:26:23Z

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.

Install PHP5 Taint in Debian Squeeze

2013-02-04T15:55:20Z

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

Restricting SSH logins to particular IP addresses

2013-01-28T23:37:44Z

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.

Sending email on submission of some syslog-ng events

2013-01-25T10:14:32Z

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.

Redeploying Debian-Administration.org ...

2013-01-21T12:59:38Z

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.