A few closing thoughts on Debian...

[Dave Laird]

Good morning, everyone...

Is there any hope of being able to successfully convert from RedHat 8.0 to
Debian Sarge running as a server, or is this scenario a case of format and
rebuild? I started thinking about this the other night, as I tried a few
different conversions between Mandrake and Debian, and I found them not
much worse than one of my recent "painless" Mandrake upgrades. However,
this is KDE, and Kontact where all the object files are pretty much the
same, including the mail format, kaddressbook, and the calendar functions.
Doing a workstation from Mandrake to Debian won't be that daunting a task,
based upon what I read in the newsgroups the last few weeks.

One of the things I am raving about over Debian is the speed of execution.
Now granted, we are talking a top-heavy KDE pair of boxes that are not
equally matched, except in the amount of memory, as they both have one gig
of memory. We are also talking about different *versions* of KDE,
obviously, as Debian appears to have the absolute latest version of KDE
and QTx, where Mandrake is still waiting for me to download 10.1. For some
utterly inane reason the Debian box, with its weaker processor, manages to
routinely run the legs off the Mandrake box, and makes it look *easy*. I
suspect the differences in KDE and QTx are at play but I'm not sure.

The other item of delight is apt-get. At last, I can finally select the
applications and the working environment for my workstation the way I want
them, not according to someone else's idea! I have always run both KDE and
Gnome, as some of the Gnome applications for database development are, by
design, much better than anything KDE has to offer. On the other hand, I
have found KDE is an excellent day-in day-out environment for mail, Usenet
news, and technical writing (Open Office). (Of course everyone has an
opinion about this and their favorite editor, too.) 8-)

A few last nagging questions, and then I'm going to give this a rest.

Since you might be running INN under Debian, or at least know of someone
who does, there is always that dreadful strategic nightmare of the news
spool when you're converting from one version of INN to another, let alone
converting from RedHat to Debian. Yes, I'm thinking of it, James. That's
how serious I am, at the present. I've simply GOT to upgrade RedHat 8.x to
something more reasonable, up-to-date and secure, but I don't have days or
even weeks to do so. I've also got to keep my version of Cleanfeed, as it
has worked impeccably well for over five years at keeping the smut and
SPAM from my upstream sites from infecting my entire news structure, with
only a few modest exceptions. Although apt-get install cleanfeed gets me
nowhere, I see where I can still download the source in Perl from the
author, and perhaps if I am lucky, I probably will be able to stick with
Cleanfeed for awhile longer. However, having converted the news spool once
before in history, I don't want to do it again, unless it is *absolutely*
necessary. Do you have any thoughts on this? I just downloaded the latest
INND into Debian and have cursorily looked at it. However, later on today
I'll transit some of the news spool in and see if it functions at all.

The battle of Sendmail vs. various other mail servers is an issue I'll
leave for someone else to decide, as I have a LOT of experience, both good
and bad, with running Sendmail. I have heard a lot of positive things
about various other products, but I have about 10,000 addresses in my
access file I really would rather keep, as is, as that, and judicious use
of an IPTables-based firewall, is how I keep my personal e-mail 100% (or
damned near that) SPAM-free.

I have witnessed a memory management problem in RedHat 9.x that appears
*only* in high-volume web servers running lots of added-on features where
the box will occasionally run out of memory, although it has 4 G at its
disposal. This seems to be an issue with Mailman, rather than Apache, and
I have seen a Debian box running under an equally heavy load that has no
such issue, with uptimes of months, rather than days. I suspect this
system will be converted over to Centos, simply because it is so
RedHat-dependent, and to save time and resources.

Suffice it to say I am impressed with Debian as a workstation, for the
present. As soon as I have the time to do so, I'll be converting my
personal workstation over to Debian and then study the results. There are
*so* many applications that are available from various Debian resources
that I will need some time, just to study the list of possible options. Is
there a good archive somewhere that lists all 5,000 applications by name
with a brief description of what each application purports to do? I'm
always on the lookout for a good database application that supports MySQL
or even the venerable dBase file format. There are more of those for
Debian than I've ever seen beneath Mandrake or RedHat, so perhaps it is a
better world into which I travel.

Please feel free to expound as needed, or if that doesn't work, just
simply slap me around for awhile...

Dave

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
Is there any hope of being able to successfully convert from RedHat 8.0 to
Debian Sarge running as a server, or is this scenario a case of format and
rebuild?

It would be interesting to clone the RH box and try the debtakeover
script on the clone to see if it works.

Post by Dave Laird
Since you might be running INN under Debian, or at least know of someone
who does, there is always that dreadful strategic nightmare of the news
spool when you're converting from one version of INN to another, let alone
converting from RedHat to Debian.

I'd set up the Debian box the way you want it, then feed the articles via
the LAN. You can use Guidedog on the RH box to easily redirect the port to
see if an online test works, if not, then switch it back and fix the
problem. Port 119 if I recall, and you can do it from the command line
though I don't know exactly what that command might be.. My point being
that there's no need to take an axe to things.

Post by Dave Laird
The battle of Sendmail vs. various other mail servers is an issue I'll
leave for someone else to decide, as I have a LOT of experience, both good
and bad, with running Sendmail. I have heard a lot of positive things
about various other products, but I have about 10,000 addresses in my
access file I really would rather keep, as is, as that, and judicious use
of an IPTables-based firewall, is how I keep my personal e-mail 100% (or
damned near that) SPAM-free.

Yes, Debian installs exim by default but I know zero about it and run
Sendmail instead. A recent upgrade (8.13.2) produces a bunch of warnings at
boot time that end with "need to reload sendmail" and later it reloads
sendmail nice and quietly. Mail service seems to be normal.

Post by Dave Laird
I have witnessed a memory management problem in RedHat 9.x that appears
*only* in high-volume web servers running lots of added-on features where
the box will occasionally run out of memory, although it has 4 G at its
disposal.

kernel option .. 2.6.10 -- processor type>high mem

If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with
more than 1 Gigabyte total physical RAM, answer "off" here (default
choice and suitable for most users). This will result in a "3GB/1GB"
split: 3GB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GB virtual memory
space and the remaining part of the 4GB virtual memory space is used
by the kernel to permanently map as much physical memory as
possible.

If the machine has between 1 and 4 Gigabytes physical RAM, then
answer "4GB" here.

If more than 4 Gigabytes is used then answer "64GB" here. This
selection turns Intel PAE (Physical Address Extension) mode on.
PAE implements 3-level paging on IA32 processors. PAE is fully
supported by Linux, PAE mode is implemented on all recent Intel
processors (Pentium Pro and better). NOTE: If you say "64GB" here,
then the kernel will not boot on CPUs that don't support PAE!

Post by Dave Laird
that I will need some time, just to study the list of possible options. Is
there a good archive somewhere that lists all 5,000 applications by name
with a brief description of what each application purports to do?

Try "apt-cache search . | less"
I see 16,658 packages with brief descriptions listed.
It's a decent tool, try "apt-cache search mysql".


--

[Dave Laird]

Good afternoon, James...

Post by James Vahn

Post by Dave Laird
Is there any hope of being able to successfully convert from RedHat 8.0
to Debian Sarge running as a server, or is this scenario a case of format
and rebuild?

It would be interesting to clone the RH box and try the debtakeover
script on the clone to see if it works.

I took one of my legacy RH boxes from offline earlier this afternoon,
between bouts of Kleenexes, and I gave this a try. This particular box was
formerly the news server before I bought some decent hardware a year ago,
so it still had both an e-mail and news server still there, and I gave it
a whirl. Among some of the surprises are that debtakeover does a pretty
good job of putting the RH directory tree into Debian format. However, it
doesn't know how to deal with the news spool nor most of the other scripts
I regularly use. However, you gave me an idea a little while ago, about
grabbing stuff, and I came up with an idea, based upon that.

Since the news spool was on a different partition and drive, the test was
actually pretty easy. I created a demi-server with INN and Sendmail and
installed a minimum of applications, no GUI and all the Debian utilities
and networking turned on. Then I configured INN the same as if I was going
to use the old news spool, making sure I kept the right newsdir format,
tradspool, and thumped the news server, making sure to reindex everything.
Be damned if it didn't work! It gave me lots of grief about renumbering,
but I think I could deal with that.

Post by James Vahn
Yes, Debian installs exim by default but I know zero about it and run
Sendmail instead. A recent upgrade (8.13.2) produces a bunch of warnings
at boot time that end with "need to reload sendmail" and later it reloads
sendmail nice and quietly. Mail service seems to be normal.

The secret to this is use a custom configuration, James. Somewhere in my
archives I have the PDF document that I have found best describes all the
tricks and traps inherent in the latest Sendmail versions. It doesn't have
all the step-by-step, but it does explain some of the more exotic parts of
setting up Sendmail with a decent handshake.

Post by James Vahn
kernel option .. 2.6.10 -- processor type>high mem
If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with
more than 1 Gigabyte total physical RAM, answer "off" here (default
choice and suitable for most users). This will result in a "3GB/1GB"
split: 3GB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GB virtual memory
space and the remaining part of the 4GB virtual memory space is used
by the kernel to permanently map as much physical memory as
possible.

I have to upgrade for this very reason. However, given the number of
scripts and dongles the client has installed on his box, my chances of
doing a conversion to Debian probably are slim to none, but Centos seems
to have what he wants as far as RPM stuff, so I'll probably roll with the
flow in his case.

Dave

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird

Post by James Vahn
Sendmail instead. A recent upgrade (8.13.2) produces a bunch of warnings
at boot time that end with "need to reload sendmail" and later it reloads

The secret to this is use a custom configuration, James. Somewhere in my
archives I have the PDF document that I have found best describes all the
tricks and traps inherent in the latest Sendmail versions. It doesn't have
all the step-by-step, but it does explain some of the more exotic parts of
setting up Sendmail with a decent handshake.

Things worked fine until a couple of weeks ago. Sendmail starts up before
the SASL daemon starts up, I'm seeing m4 compiler errors.. I think that's
what the problem is, someone gave one of them the wrong init.d number and
it's acting up. I'd sure like to add your PDF to my collection though.
All I'm using for docs are the Operations Handbook (op.me) and cf.README


--

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
there a good archive somewhere that lists all 5,000 applications by name
with a brief description of what each application purports to do?

Someone seems to have heard you and has come up with a new program.
I'm running "apt-get install packagesearch debtags apt-file" at this
very moment. :-)

Package: packagesearch
Description: A GUI to allow easy searching of packages
This tool is aimed to help you search the packages you need. It
should make the task of searching a pleasant experience.
The new categorisation system "debtags" is supported by this tool.
You can search by pattern, tags, files and installed status.
.
The program is not meant to be a package managment tool like synaptic.


--

[Dave Laird]

Good afternoon, James...

Post by James Vahn

Post by Dave Laird
there a good archive somewhere that lists all 5,000 applications by name
with a brief description of what each application purports to do?

Someone seems to have heard you and has come up with a new program.
I'm running "apt-get install packagesearch debtags apt-file" at this
very moment. :-)

YOWSA! I did install and use it for nearly half an hour, and I haven't
reached the end of the query for MySQL yet. ;-) Now THIS is the type of
research tool we *used* have on the Internet over a decade ago, and now
it's a GUI. This is WAY cool. I have to have a Debian workstation, if for
no other reason than I have never seen anything like this in years!

Dave