Debian GNU/Linux System Administration Resources

Easily forwarding arbitrary TCP connections with rinetd

2008-07-01T12:30:22Z

In the past we've examined the use of firewall rules for forwarding incoming connections from one machine to another. But there is a simpler approach using the rinetd package. Read on to learn about this tool.

Make your own configuration deployment system, part 1

2008-06-30T20:24:43Z

In this series of articles, I describe the steps to making a flexible configuration deployment system tailored to your needs. It can be as simple or as complete as you care to make it. And since you made it, you can understand it intimately.

Question: Best tool for bare metal restore of Debian servers?

2008-06-04T11:46:35Z

I've been doing a bit of searching through the Debian Administration (http://www.debian-administration.org/) archives and one thing that doesn't seem to have been discussed very much is full system recovery. There are plenty of discussions on different backup (/tags/backups) options, but nothing targeted at what seems to me the simplest possible backup scenario: protecting a single machine (specifically a server) so that if it is compromised it can be rolled back to a previous state.

Calculate network, broadcast, netmask, etc with ipcalc

2008-06-03T14:44:45Z

Ipcalc is a simple tool to calculate network, broadcast, netmask, etc. from an IP address. It also gives the class of the IP. It might facilitate the work of network admins. :-)

Monitoring with Munin

2008-05-23T13:47:55Z

In this article I will describe how to install munin (http://munin.projects.linpro.no/) on 2 computers, but you can add more if you want to, this will allow us to remotely monitor system performance and activity.

Critical security update for openssl

2008-05-13T14:37:17Z

A new security advisory has recently been released relating to the Debian openssl package, and whilst most security updates are not news-worthy this one is. Read on for a brief overview of the problem.

Need a generic iptables tcp proxy?

2008-05-13T10:02:56Z

Do you ever find yourself in need of a generic TCP proxy? Do you wish you could do it with netfilter? Do you want to proxy a connection to a given port on a given IP address to a completely different port on a totally different host or network?

How to use any command in FTP ?

2008-04-25T12:09:30Z

I wanted to use the "find" command on a FTP space but it's not possible to use this command with any "normal" FTP client. So, I looked for a solution.

Logical Volume Management: How PVs form VGs for LVs

2008-04-22T16:19:05Z

When I set out to build my first system using Logical Volume Management I was surprised by the lack of information about how LVM relates to more "traditional" disk-level partitioning. There were plenty of articles with examples of how to use 'vgcreate' and 'lvresize' and no short supply of advice and white noise from the forums, but there was very little practical information about what the various strata of LVM were actually for or how they related to each other. In fact I was well into my search for information before I figured out where to put the file system.

Making Apache2 execute CGI scripts, globally?

2008-04-14T12:08:38Z

I have set up a Debian etch system with apache2, perl etc, but I cannot get apache to actually execute my scripts..