How To Search For Missing Packages With apt-file On Debian and Ubuntu

This short article describes how you can search for missing packages with apt-file on Debian and Ubuntu systems. apt-file allows you to search for a file name, and it gives back the name(s) of the package(s) containing that file so that you can install the appropriate package.

Install and Configure Auth Shadow on Debian/Ubuntu

Auth Shadow or mod-auth-shadow is a module for apache (and apache2, sort of) that enables authentication against /etc/shadow. The benefits being that any system user with a password can be authenticated for web_dav, subversion or simply an https server. The only other way to do this is with PAM. That method is dangerous because the apache user (www-data in my case) must be able to read /etc/shadow. Obviously, not a good idea. Auth Shadow accomplishes this safely by using a intermediate program called validate. This works because validate can be owned by root but executable by everyone. In the event that your server is compromised through apache, your password file will not be readable.

How To Set Up A Ubuntu/Debian  LAMP Server

This tutorial shows a quick way to set up your own LAMP server (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP/Perl)  on a Ubuntu or Debian system.

How To Create A Local Debian/Ubuntu Mirror With apt-mirror

This tutorial shows how to create a Debian/Ubuntu mirror for your local network with the tool apt-mirror. Having a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror is good if you have to install multiple systems in your local network because then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.

OpenVZ On Debian Etch For Webservers

Virtualization is nice! A good practice for servers, since it makes things more secure, scalable, replacable, and replicable. All this at the cost of little added complexity. This guide is written during an install of a Supermicro machine with 2 dual-core opterons (64-bit), 2 identical disks (for RAID) and a load of memory. Why OpenVZ and not XEN or the recent KVM kernel module? Well, XEN is not very stable for 64-bit architectures (yet), and it comes with quite a bit of overhead (every VM runs its own kernel) due to its complexity. KVM is very simple but restricts you to run a kernel as one process, so the VM cannot benefit from multi core systems.

How To Compile A Kernel - The Debian (Sarge) Way

Each distribution has some specific tools to build a custom kernel from the sources. This article is about compiling a kernel on Debian Sarge systems. It describes how to build a custom kernel using the latest unmodified kernel sources from www.kernel.org (vanilla kernel) so that you are independent from the kernels supplied by your distribution. It also shows how to patch the kernel sources if you need features that are not in there.

Linux-Vserver on Debian Testing (Etch), the easy way 

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to install Linux-Vserver on Debian Testing (Etch). Basically, Linux-Vserver is an open-source system used to separate a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. From the Linux-Vserver website: "Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed."

How To Install A PLONE CMS On Debian

This tutorial shows how to install and use Plone with Python on Debian.

Converting .rpm Packages To Debian/Ubuntu .deb Format With Alien

This article shows how you can convert .rpm packages to .deb packages with a tool called alien so that you can easily install them on Debian and Ubuntu systems. Sometimes this is quite convenient as not all software projects release their software as Debian/Ubuntu packages.

The Perfect Xen 3.0.3 Setup For Debian Sarge

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 3.0.3) on a Debian Sarge (3.1) system.

Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it's more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.