Notes on debian system administration

Notes taken over 10 years ago, when I used to work with Debian systems.

How to get the list of packages installed

dpkg --list

To remove subversion:

apt-get remove subversion
apt-get remove libsvn0

How to know which packages may be upgraded

apt-show-versions -u

Raid disk stuff

RAID-1 mirror reconstruction notes. These I have not used since 2008, so man mdadm may have much better information!

Mark as failed:

mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/hda1

Remove from array:

mdadm /dev/md0 -r /dev/hda1

Add to array as spare:

mdadm -a /dev/hda1

Debian sources.list for apt

The sources list page on the debian wiki explains what one has to add to the apt/sources.list file to use contrib non-free

Notes about debian packaging

Slide 7 explains that a .deb archive is an “ar” (archive, as processed by the library tool ar):

$ ar tv wget_1 .12 -2.1 _i386.deb

The command above wil extract the components, a binary, a control and a data component.

Footnotes