Debian/Ubuntu Tips and Tricks

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Debian/Ubuntu Tips and Tricks

Archive for the 'Administration' Category

How Tos on administration. How to make your system run smoothly, tips and tricks on getting over common troubles.

How-To: Remote syslog logging on Debian and Ubuntu

Posted by chantra on 30th June 2008

syslogd is the Linux system logging utility that take care of filling up your files in /var/log when it is asked to.

On a standard system, logging is only done on the local drive. But syslog can be configured to receive logging from a remote client, or to send logging to a remote syslog server.

Some of the use cases could be:

  • A machine which filesystem goes read-only
  • Log replication

this tutorial will explain how to set up both the server, to receive message from a remote client, and the client to emit messages to a syslogd server.

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How-To: Set up a LAN gateway with DHCP, Dynamic DNS and iptables on Debian Etch — page 4 — IPtables

Posted by chantra on 29th June 2008

3. Forwarding Internet traffic with IPtables

IPtables is both used to act as a firewall, but it is also the one passing packets from one network to another.

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How-To: Set up a LAN gateway with DHCP, Dynamic DNS and iptables on Debian Etch — page 3 — DHCP server

Posted by chantra on 29th June 2008

2. DHCP server

In order to provide an IP address to the other machines in the network, we need to use a DHCP server.
This DHCP server will provide the host with all the information needed to connect to any other accessible host. i.e, the IP, netmask, gateway, domain name server.
The DHCP server will also update bind with a nt set of hostname and IP when the client is requesting a specific hostname.

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How-To: Set up a LAN gateway with DHCP, Dynamic DNS and iptables on Debian Etch — page 2 — DNS server

Posted by chantra on 29th June 2008

1. DNS server

As a DNS server we are going to use bind9, it will be configured to resolve the names of the host for our network lan.debuntu.local.

The DNS server will also accept dynamic DNS update from the local DHCP server.

In this tutorial, I will be using the Dynamic DNS feature of bind.

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How-To: Set up a LAN gateway with DHCP, Dynamic DNS and iptables on Debian Etch

Posted by chantra on 29th June 2008

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

  • DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
  • DNS server to resolve domain names
  • Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
  • Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job.

As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

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How-To: copy files over the network and preserve file permissions and informations with ssh and rsync

Posted by chantra on 20th June 2008

When copying files over the network, the files informations can be modified.

When using cp, one can avoid this issue by using the -a which will do the copy in archive mode, meaning that it will keep the links, preserve mode, ownership and timestamps and the copy is recursive.

the solution to this over the network is rsync alongside with ssh.

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How-To set up a serial console client

Posted by chantra on 3rd May 2008

In the 2 previous articles, I explained how to set up a serial console on Ubuntu and Debian.

This tutorial will now show how to connect to those serial console using another machine using a software called minicom.

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How-To set up a serial console on Debian

Posted by chantra on 3rd May 2008

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Debian Linux.

Debian uses sysvinit to handle the booting process, amongst the different task, and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

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How-To set up a serial console on Ubuntu

Posted by chantra on 3rd May 2008

This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Ubuntu Linux.

Unlike most other distros, Ubuntu uses upstart instead of sysvinit and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

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How-To: Customizing SSH client

Posted by chantra on 12th April 2008

SSH is great. There is so many thing you can do with it other than just a remote secure shell like X forwarding, port forwarding, authenticate using a private/public key, compress the transmitted stream….

If you have different account that you use on an every day basis, it becomes quickly cumbersome to type those lengthly command lines.

One could work around this by using aliases, the right way would be to use ~/.ssh/config

This tutorial will show some customization examples that should cover most ssh use cases.

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