Small list of stuff I've discovered in out of the way places about Debian.
Thanks to Wichert Akkerman for
being my Debian helpdesk :-)
- Trouble logging in remotely? By default debian is setup to be 'PARANOID' about
forward and reverse mismatches of hosts trying to connect. Remove the
'PARANOID' line from /etc/hosts.deny
- Have modified a package and don't want apt to update it? You can 'hold'
a package by doing this: echo packagename hold | dpkg
--set-selections
- To run a command at each and every boot, place an executable script in
/etc/rc.boot. Don't forget to remove any ~ backup files, they may be ran too
- Want fsck to fix each and every error and never wait for you to press
'y'? Edit /etc/default/rcS - there are some interesting other flags there
too
- If you have a complicated network with asymmetric routes and some
interfaces are mysteriously not seeing traffic, it often helps to turn off
the reverse path filter. Do so by editing /etc/network/options and setting
spoof_protect to no
-
If you run a self compiled mailer, apt will deinstall all mail
tools because it believes there is no mailer for them to work with. apt-get
install equivs, and use the provided templates to create a package that
convinces apt that you do have a mailer.
- If you run testing or unstable, you may find that there are packages
available which don't appear in /var/lib/dpkg/available. This can be fixed
by running dselect update every once in a while, which exports all
available packages to /var/lib/dpkg/available again. Alternatively, just run
dselect update instead of running apt-get update.
- Sometimes a package leaves traces around that can cause problems when
reinstalling. Use dpkg -P packagename to purge all traces. This
happens a lot to postfix. If that fails, remove the offending line from
/var/lib/dpkg/info/packagename.prerm
- When moving a system to a situation where it boots from a raid device
(/dev/md0 for example) and you use Debian kernel packages, you may need to
edit the mkinitrd configuration so that it starts your raid. See
/etc/mkinitrd/modules for details, especially the 'root=' option.
.
- Also see this link from Linuxmafia