Debian Administration

Many services are starting to become available over IPv6, including this site, but the majority of home users cannot access them. If you'd like to see the IPv6 internet chances are it won't be difficult for you though.

Many readers will have heard about Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok's work to boot an ASUS Eee 901 in 5 seconds. Inspired by this work, and because I have the same laptop, I decided to try to reproduce their results. So far I have not come very close to their 5 seconds, but I have made some significant improvements compared to the default boot time for Debian on that machine; this article describes what I've done.

The FUSE project allows you to create filesystems in userspace - which means you can create a filesystem without having to get your hands dirty and modify your kernel source. This is insanely cool, and can be used for many purposes. Here we're going to look at using the Ruby bindings to create a simple filesystem.

When you need to run a website (https), mail (ssl/tls) or similar over an encrypted link - you need an SSL certificate. This article will explain some of the choices involved, and how to run your own certificate authority (CA).

I recently installed Mailman on on my server to provide a mailing list for my extended family. While in the end, I was able to scrounge up the articles I needed by searching the web, many of them were woefully outdated. Here is a short article that pulls together my research and describes in one place what is needed to get Mailman running happily under Debian etch with Exim4.

Although comments can be a blessing in the configuration file of an unfamiliar system, they eventually become annoying if one is already very familiar with the file. In some extreme cases, they can actually be an obstruction to clarity.

There used to be a script to do it automatically via init.d files, but now the suggested method is to use ifup.d networking scripts, which are executed on state changes of the network interfaces. So I submit here my simple script, which does the trick for me nicely.

apropos is a standard unix command which is very frequently forgotten. That is a shame as this tool it is to man pages, what google is to the world wide web!

It was recently announced that the next Debian stable release, the one after Lenny, will be called Squeeze.

I'm currently running Debian lenny and would like to be able to watch and listen to flash clips online (youtube?) with epiphany - but I'm having problems.