Homo-Adminus Blog

This will be one of those posts I’d like to publish primarily to be able to coma back later and check it out instead of reading docs again

So, we have a server with two (or more) network interfaces are we need to be able to use more than one interface in our VDS machines. How do we set it up?

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Few days ago I’ve started migration of some of my non-critical servers to Debian Etch (from Sarge). Just after first apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, when apt has been upgraded, I noticed really strange (as for me) error: when I’ve tried to do “apt-get update” it worked fine, but there was annoying message like following:

UPDATE: Thanks to Kurt Fitzner we know, that:

There is already a mechanism to do this automatically:

$ apt-key update

This will obtain the necesary keys and import them. No need to go through gpg directly.

After not so long research I figured out, that this problem was caused by change of gpg key used by ftpmaster on Debian official repository servers. Google gave me some information and I found some fix which works fine for me:

Where XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is your missing key (e.g A70DAF536070D3A1).

That’s it! Happy using Debian GNU/Linux!

Sometimes, especially if you have switched from some another GNU/Linux distribution to Debian GNU/Linux, your will have one major problem: you are missing some software available in your previous distribution. That is were Debian unofficial repositories can help you.

In this post I want to describe the most popular unofficial repositories with set of useful packages for my favorite Linux distribution - Debian .

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I really like Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions. That is because I am admin and I am lazy as all good system administrators With apt-get based distributions I can install/update/deinstall system packages very fast and my work becomes very efficient (there is no rpm-hell or constant building of new software or software updates).

Today I dugg very useful primer for apt-get/dpkg users. It contains many real-life examples of work with apt-get and dpkg utilities and may be interesting for new debian administrators.

Few days ago Oracle Database Express Edition has been released.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that’s free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer. Oracle Database XE is a great starter database for:

• Developers working on PHP, Java, .NET, and Open Source applications
• DBAs who need a free, starter database for training and deployment
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors who want a starter database to distribute free of charge
• Educational institutions and students who need a free database for their curriculum

I have spent some time for installing it on Debian Sarge because it has only Debian Unstable support and many people does not know, that required lib (libaio) can be installed to Sarge. Now, I will describe step-by-step howto about installing Oracle XE on Debian Sarge.

First of all, you do not need to download Oracle XE installation package for Debian from Oracle Express Download Page. You do not need to do it because Oracle has its own debian repository for automated installations.

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