debian

Replicator [1] is a set of Perl scripts meants to automate the replication of Debian GNU/Linux installations, ranging from Debian GNU/Linux Desktops to Cluster Computing servers. It allows to install easily and in a few minutes the same software on various machines with potentially different hardware.

Debian GNU/Linux is one of the main and earlier GNU/Linux distribution. You may wonder why it is our preferred distribution.

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2007
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/359).

Very good article mentionning howto get it working on Debian very quickly: Article on Freaks Unidos' wiki This article makes it a lot easier although the SSL part might not work directly as expected: Howtoforge article on SVN installation This article

This article is incomplete and was first written in September 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/343).

An example on how to activate NAT on a Debian box (on Etch and up). First, activate IP forwarding in /etc/sysctl.conf. Then, you need to activate NAT itself in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.254
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.1.255
        up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $IFACE -j MASQUERADE

There you are.

This article is incomplete and was first written in July 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/342).

IPv6 is still not widely accepted and even less used.

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/339).

On Debian, an infrastructure is in place in directories /etc/cron.* to extend and improve the crontabs.

Why ?

Usually, crontabs are managed at the user level, which can start crontab -e to edit its own or crontab -l to just list it.

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006 
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/336).

This is a procedure to upgrade a Debian Sarge GNOME Desktop PC to Debian Etch. First, make sure you are not using devfs. If you are using udev, or no device manager daemon, then you are ready. Also, I did not test upgrade from a 2.4 kernel, only 2.6 to 2.6. Make sure all your packages belong to well-known apt sources, otherwise, you will probably have to fix things by hands later.

This article was first written in May 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/334).

Basically, moving a CVS repository itself is not really difficult. Let's assume first that we don't use the pserver mode of CVS, which is known to be weak with respect to security. We use then the SSH transport to access the CVS server, which we strongly recommend. On Debian, the CVS repository is located by default in /var/lib/cvs. At install time, a debconf question asked you where to set it.

This article was first written in February 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/327).

Starting from kernel 2.4, Linux has got the kernel oplocks feature.

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.