Tech Crunch

This article was first written in February 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/326).

Sun Solaris is probably today's most-used UNIX OS around, probably due to its security and high-performance approach. It has been traditionally running mostly on SPARC, a little on Intel platforms, but is now happily running on AMD64 also. Lately, Sun decided to opensource it, and everybody should probably be happy of this move.

This article was first written in February 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/325).

This technology is meant to merge several network links into one logical, providing with higher availability and higher throughput (while it is not absolutely necessary to use both aspects at the same time). Some vendors call it Trunking (ex.: Sun) or Link Aggregation. It's all the same technology, and they communicate together rather well.

This article was first written in January 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/323).

Sometimes, you will find useful not to have to install Arkeia on your machine (a Linux system) to restore an old tape.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/320).

In some situation (when using previously devfs, for example), your /dev is empty of static files, and moving to udev or coming back to static /dev is then impossible. In package debootstrap on Debian, there is the file /usr/lib/debootstrap/devices.tar.gz (or /usr/share/debootstrap/devices.tar.gz in newer releases) which only contains standard /dev files. To set them in place is then just:

# cd /mount_point
# tar zxvf /usr/lib/debootstrap/

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/319).

Introduction

This article explains how to install the SCIM (Simplified Chinese Input Method) together with enough Japanese resources to enable Japanese input on your desktop (GNOME 2 in this case). SCIM is a software that can run as a daemon in order to enable special, on the fly, character substitution while you type something on a normal keyboard.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/318).

If you get this message [1] on a NFS client while trying to access a file or directory on a NFS server, chances are you can fix it by killing the processes that try to access it. Chances are that you don't know which processes may be involved.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/314).

From time to time, you would like to have a more recent version of an application than what is currently packaged in Debian  [1]. This is basically the same process as backporting anyway. There has been the introduction in Debian of a new set of tools called Debian External Health Status (dehs) which proved really useful for QA.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/313).

To do the best use of Debian's superior package management system (APT), the application must be packaged, in the form of one or several .deb files. Packaging has many, many advantages, you just couldn't believe. As Debian is all about Free Software, it is clear that the preferred source for a package be the upstream source package. That way, submitting patches upstream is as simple as possible as they are naturally available to the World.

This article was first written in November 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/304).

If you notice warning messages like these when doing an APT update, read this to fix it:

W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.tux.org unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY BB5E459A529B8BDA

To fix it, take the last 8 characters of the PUBKEY here above and issue the following commands:

testmachine$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 529B8BDA
gpg: requesting key 529B

This article was first written in November 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/299).

The following has been tested on Debian Sarge, but may work with later versions. Follow this procedure if you refused to split the Exim4 configuration as debconf proposes. If you did split it, it would be slightly different.