Debian

If you have this: debconf: DbDriver "config": mkdir :No such file or directory You might just have deleted /var/cache/debconf. Solving this is easy: mkdir -f /var/cache/debconf apt-get -f install

On my spare time, I manage a handful of servers. And even if it’s not really my job, I try to do it well and efficiently. All of them work on Debian because it’s simple to manage. I started using cron-apt a few years ago. I started by upgrading everything automatically, this was a big mistake. I switched to only sending mails on available upgrades and doing the upgrade manually. But this is also quite painful because 95% of the time, it consists in typing “apt-get dist-upgrade -y” and waiting and I have lots more interestings things to do. ...

Debian released a new version of their system. I updated it on the server that powers this blog, it took me something like one hour to do the whole system upgrade. There was only a little glitch with mysql’s my.cnf file that had an unsupported “skip-bdb” line. Everything else went fine… The very good thing in this new release is the new kfreebsd version (available in i386 and x86_64). It brings the power of the FreeBSD kernel to the great Debian OS. If you don’t see the point, read this. To put in a nutshell: a more stable kernel with less legal issues, better vendors support and the same softwares. ...

I switched from Debian to CentOS because I had the choice between an old 32 bits Debian 4.0 or a brand new 64 bits CentOS 5.3. And I have some scripts that use the great start-stop-daemon tool, which isn’t available on CentOS. The easiest way to solve this problem is to get dpkg from Debian and then try to compile it. It’s likely that it will fail because libselinux (and it’s subsidiary library libsepol) won’t be registered in the pkgconfig dir. But we don’t really care as we only need start-stop-daemon, not dpkg. ...

I’ve switched from my two three years old dedicated servers to one brand new virtual server. Reasons are : These servers costed me too much and they were becoming old (risk of failure increases). It wasn’t worth it. I spent last night doing that because I didn’t want to interrupt anybody using these servers. My two servers were running some Debian and I’m now switching to a CentOS virtual server. I was a little bit worried at first that CentOS would have a crappy package management system, but its yum is in fact working the same way as Debian’s apt-get and OpenSuse’s zypper. The oool thing is that these three package management systems roughly work the same way : <apt-get/yum/zypper> install , you don’t have to learn a new “ultimate” way to upgrade your software (like on FreeBSD). By the way, the faster package management system is yum, and the slowest one is zypper. ...