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Questions tagged [debian]

Debian is a popular and influential GNU/Linux distribution. Questions here should generally be about Debian Server.

Debian GNU/Linux its one of the oldest and more popular Linux distributions. The Debian project was started in 1993 by Ian Murdock (the name Debian is a junction of Debra + Ian, his girlfriend at the time). Debian strongest points are the portability, stability and commitment to the free software ideal.

The current Debian version (6.0, code named Squeeze) has more than 29.000 software packages available on nine platforms (including SPARC, ARM, PowerPC), and 2 platforms supporting the FreeBSD kernel (Debian GNU/kfreebsd on i386 and amd64). The Debian APT package management provides dependency management and strong update and upgrade capabilities.

Debian maintains normally 3 versions of its repositories: stable (the current release), testing (the next release), unstable (new packages and versions). After debian makes a new release, the previous stable release is maintained for one year, and is re-labed oldstable. Squeeze also included the backports repository where some software from the testing will be made available to the stable release, and updates (previously named volatile) to deal with software that evolves too fast. Debian also makes point releases with aggregated updates and updated tools, those keep the release name but update the version like Debian 6.1 for example.

Debian has a Social Contract with its users and will only distribute on its main distribution software that is compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.Those two devices were created on the early days of the distribution and also are the basis for Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition.

The Debian project organization counts with the Debian Project Leader, the Debian Project Secretary and the Debian Developers. The developers are responsible for the releases, packaging software, managing the FTPs, security and so on. Each Project Leader is elected for a period of one year and any Developer can be a candidate.

Ubuntu Linux uses Debian as its base, as well as other well known distributions like Maemo, Mint, Knoppix and several others. The Wikipedia article has also more details about the distribution, as well as Debian's official site.

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Reset admin password of OpenVAS

When I installed OpenVAS, I was prompted for a password, however the prompt errored out. I have installed OpenVAS and it is working properly, however I cant get in as admin (I created a new user and that works fine). I've tried googling how to reset…
Sugitime
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Why does redhat seem to be so popular in the enterprise world?

Title says it all. For personal usage, I tend to prefer Debian/Ubuntu over Redhat. It's not necessarily that I dislike Redhat (or more specifically CentOS or Fedora) so much as it is that I like Debian's package management system so much…
Jason Baker
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Symbolic link and filezilla over sftp

I'm pretty new to debian, and I'm trying to set up a server. I have created a user who can only access his folder /home/username (and its subdirectory). Now I want to use that user for the webserver I set up, and I have given him access to /var/www…
Doc
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How can I upgrade PHP to a higher version for Debian Squeeze?

Currently, my PHP is on 5.3.3, how can I upgrade it? Also how can I upgrade anything? For example, if I want to upgrade phpMyAdmin as well?
Strawberry
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Too many open files on Debian

I have long running process at Debian. At some point in throw an error: Too many open files. Running: ulimit -a shows: open files (-n) 1024 I wish to increase number of open files in 2 times. After execution ulimit -n…
FoxyBOA
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Rsync over ssh with root access on both sides

I have one older ubuntu server, and one newer debian server and I am migrating data from the old one to the new one. I want to use rsync to transfer data across to make final migration easier and quicker than the equivalent tar/scp/untar process. As…
Tim Abell
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How do I completely remove mysql-server on Debian?

I figured I'd share my question here and then answer, as there seems to be many people stuck in my position - but no definitive answer. The problem is, if you apt-get remove mysql-server, it does not clean up the configuration and database files, so…
Nick Bolton
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No IPv6 connectivity from docker container

i'm having serious problems enabling IPv6 in docker. Environment The host is running Debian Jessie. It's a virtual Server (KVM). eth0 has a statically configured address like w:x:y:z::1 in a network like w:x.y:z::/64, which is assigned to my by…
lajuette
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Ulimit file descriptor limits not being applied for particular process

I recently checked one of our redis processes to what ulimits where applied using: cat /proc//limits And was suprised to learn that is was at the low default value: Limit Soft Limit Hard Limit Max…
UpTheCreek
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Standard or best way to keep alive process started by init.d

I'm looking for a standard way or best practice to keep a daemon started by an init.d shell script alive. Or even better, is there a way to keep it alive directly from /etc/init.d? Specifically, I have a daemon called dtnd with and infinite loop…
Adrian Antunez
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install the same debian packages on another system

How do I export a list of installed Debian packages on a system, and then install those same packages on a new system?
jes5199
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All Debian boot messages

How can the messages that scroll by when booting a Debian system be reviewed later? In other words, how can I review absolutely all of them conveniently? That's the important point to the question; merely a subset of them is insufficient. Some boot…
MarkDBlackwell
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How to install two packages that write the same file

I have two packages that each create /usr/bin/ffprobe. One of them is ffmpeg from the Deb Multimedia repository, while the other is ffmbc 0.7-rc5 built from source. The hand-rolled one is business-critical, and we used to just install it from source…
Joel E Salas
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"Cannot set terminal process group" during su to another user as login shell

Note: Please read the updated information starting with "EDIT" near the halfway point of this post - the environment and background of this problem has changed I've got a bog standard Debian 6.0 install here that I decided to sidegrade to the Debian…
Mikey T.K.
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apt: how to search using package tags?

Some (most?) packages in Debian, have tags. For example: =# apt-cache show squirrelmail | perl -lne 'print if /^Tag:/.../^\S/' Tag: implemented-in::php, interface::web, mail::imap, mail::smtp, mail::user-agent, network::server, protocol::http,…
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