HOWTO Keep a network of Debians up-to-date 

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/289).
Due to the unrivaled apt tools, Debian is probably the easiest GNU/Linux distribution to keep up-to-date, at least when you have a fast Internet connection. In a network of many machines, the goal is slightly different though: you probably want to take as little bandwidth as possible away from users.

cron-apt

The first part of the solution, and the easiest to setup, is to install package cron-apt which will download the packages

ntop 

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/287).
ntop ntop is a nice tool with a nice web interface (and a CLI interface also). Sadly, it is currently leaking too much memory and CPU cycles to let it run for a long time on a server.

Networked printing infrastructure using CUPS on Debian 

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/286).
In a networked infrastructure, with many workstations needing to print (or generate PDF or PS files, or send faxes), CUPS may help a lot, especially with its automatic network-browsing features. Let's see how to set that up.

CUPS Server

First, you probably want to setup a server to share printers.

sort 

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/285).
Sorting a passwd database on UNIX based on user ids: 
sort -t: -k 3 -n /etc/passwd

Admin CVS on RH FC2 

This article was first written in July 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/284).

Introduction

This article mainly describes several tricks to admin a CVS install on RHFC2.

Adding a user

Adding a user for pserver is done by updating the CVSROOT/passwd file in the CVS modules repository.

Activating the DHCP server in a Cisco router 

This article was first written in July 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/280).
Here is an example on how to configure a DHCP server on a Cisco router. 
ip domain-name 195.238.2.21
ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.64.1
ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.1.7
ip dhcp pool DHCPPool
   import all
   network 192.168.64.0 255.255.255.0
   dns-server 195.238.2.21 195.238.2.22
   default-router 192.168.64.253
   option 150 ip 10.31.1.107
Note that the DHCP pool is 192.168.64.0/24 and that there are excluded addresses.

HOWTO Clean packages on a Debian system 

This article was first written in July 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/282).
A Debian system can take more and more disk space as you install new packages. Let's see how we can detect which packages are no longer used (unsused/obsolete/transitional) and clean them if we are sure we don't need them anymore. First, it is good to know that when you use apt (apt-get, aptitude, dselect, synaptic, ...) the files downloaded are stored in /var/cache/apt/archives, and never cleaned.
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