Here is a quick SSH tip that I only discovered a month or two ago despite years of using SSH on a daily basis. When SSH freezes, as can sometimes happen if the network connection drops, it is possible to kill the connection more elegantly than just by closing the terminal tab (my previous way of dea …

Recently, the Debian project announced that they intend to make more of their services available as Tor hidden services. They have added a new package to the repositories making it easy to use Tor hidden services when using apt to upgrade packages.Tor is software that allows better anonymity when …

There is fuller documentation of how to set up unattended upgrades on the debian wiki, but it is sometimes nice to have a super-compact cheatsheet for ones own reference. Others may have a use for it too.First thing to do is to install the necessary unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges packag …

When I administer mail servers, I often use the aliases functionality to set up email groups and forwards. I find it very convenient to have everything in a single file. One thing that I don't like is keeping all the names in alphabetical order. While doing so might seeem like something from the …

There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I’d write up the easiest way that I’ve found to do so. It only has two steps. How …

I like to make sure that I always have a listing of all the files I have on my Debian boxen. Fortunately dpkg has a quick way of doing just that. # dpkg --get-selections > /path/to/mybackup.txt I run that once a day or so as a cron job dumping to a file, that file will be in my usual rsync backup. …