The Bcfg2 version available in debian etch is quite old (v0.8.6), while the one in lenny is newer v0.9.5.7, it still isn’t the latest stable version 0.9.6 that was released in November last year. Since this version fixes many bugs it is the version that is recommended to use in production at this time (unfortunately it breaks the reporting system, that will not be fixed until the release 1.0 planed for the next months). This post will show how we can rebuild a debian package for the latest stable bcfg2 release so we can easily deploy it on several machines.

Bcfg2 is a debian friendly project, meaning they provide inside the source package all what is needed to build a debian package very easy. We will use for this a debian etch system, but this should work on any debian based system. Read the rest of this entry »

This article will show how you can rebuild any debian package. You might need to rebuild a package for various reasons: add/remove some compilation options, make some changes to the sources, or compile a newer version from testing/sid into stable, etc. Regardless of your reason, this can be done very easy using debian tools.

First you will need to have some basic debian building tools installed:
apt-get install devscripts build-essential Read the rest of this entry »

More than a month ago I have seen a post by Joerg Jaspert on the Debian devel announce list that was announcing the inclusion of the amd64 port in the official Debian mirrors. At that time only the unstable branch was included, and he explained that amd64.debian.net will maintain the testing tree until this will be fully synced with the debian-installer so the Debian Etch system will use only Debian mirrors. If you are using the stable release (sarge) then this would not affect you in any way, as they will continue to keep it updated.

Since I manage several servers with Debian Etch AMD64, I was very happy to see that the amd64 port was finally approved and included in the official mirrors. There was no date when this will actually happen for the testing release, but it happened exactly as described: after a period of no updates, today you will notice 404s from amd64.debian.net, and this means it is finally over… Read the rest of this entry »

I often want to see what packages I have installed on a debian system. Also I like to see what are the upgrades available. This can be achieved with apt-show-versions that does them both: list all the packages installed and their respective version and also it can show what are the upgrades available and their version.

apt-show-versions is not automatically installed so we have to install it first:

aptitude install apt-show-versions

Now, if I want to see all the packages installed and their version I will run it without any parameter (maybe you will want to pipe the command with more or output it to a file as the list will be probably quite large):

apt-show-versions |more
php4-gd/stable uptodate 4:4.3.10-16
groff-base/etch uptodate 1.18.1.1-12
m4/etch uptodate 1.4.4-1
libmysqlclient15off/etch uptodate 5.0.20-1
ncftp/etch uptodate 2:3.1.9-1
...

As you can see the list is not sorted so maybe it will be useful to sort the output:

apt-show-versions |sort |more
acpid/etch uptodate 1.0.4-5
adduser/etch uptodate 3.87
apache2-common/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-mpm-prefork/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-prefork-dev/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apache2-utils/etch uptodate 2.0.55-4
apt/etch uptodate 0.6.43.3
...

If I want to see the available upgrades I will have to just include the -u parameter:

apt-show-versions -u
php4-pgsql/etch upgradeable from 3:4.3.10-4 to 4:4.4.2-1+b1
php4-interbase/etch upgradeable from 4.3.10-2 to 4:5.1.2-1
php4-imagick/etch upgradeable from 0.9.11-0.2 to 4:0.9.11+1-2
...