Debian Administration

The GNOME desktop environment is the default for Debian etch, and is one that I use every day. One thing that I always have a hard time remembering is how to setup global keyboard shortcuts, so this quick guide will document the process.

The purpose of this article is to give you a straight-forward, Debian-friendly way of installing and configuring OpenAFS 1.4.x, the recommended production version of OpenAFS for UNIX. By the end of this guide, you will have a functional OpenAFS installation that will complete our solution for secure, centralized network logins with shared home directories.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian's history an update for a stable distribution also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers.

Imagine you have denyhosts installed and it is adding new attackers to /etc/hosts.deny. Wouldn't it be great to inform the relevant people so that some action could be taken? With the right plugin that is possible, but there is a problem with the default reporting that we'll explain here.

If you're using a system which has a lot of users, and you'd like to see who has started a particular script, daemon, or binary, then the pstree utility is very helpful. It draws a tree of all currently running processes - allowing you to see which processes are related.

tree is a very simple utility which will draw a tree of a directory structure. It isn't a command which is generally useful, but it can be very handy to know about if you're writing articles!

There are many times when it is useful to be able to repeatedly run a command, or set of commands, repeatedly. You could do this yourself with a simple shell script, but using watch makes it simple.

My email server uses SMTP AUTH with PLAIN or LOGIN. Thus the password is send without encryption (base64 doesn't count honest). The server listens on port 465 so that the password can be encrypted using SSL, if people prefer not to send their password in plain text (my users generally know not to do that, or at least let me set up their mail clients).

There are a lot of articles upon this site, and it appears that many of the most popular are those that are written with the complete beginner in mind. After realizing this I've got a decided to introduce a miniseries covering a few easily-overlooked tools and commands over the next week.

Hopefully you've all heard of CERT VU#800113, this is for people who didn't understand it.