Articles by Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg)

  1. using debian system-created user accounts?

    Does anyone use the backup user for doing local system backups? or do you create a new user specifically for that?

    I ask because backup is debian-specific uid 34, provided by the base-passwd package. But reading /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz, i find only this:

    backup    Presumably so …
  2. tzconfig failing on xen instances

    I had trouble recently with a few xen etch instances built off the typical etch xen packages. The problem was that the domUs all reported time natively in UTC, despite my having used tzconfig to set it to my local timezone (i'm not in UTC).

    Within the domU, while i …

  3. modify /etc/skel to ease admin of key-based SSH

    When i set up a new machine these days, I often disable password-based ssh access by setting PasswordAuthentication and ChallengeResponseAuthentication to no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

    This protects my users (and the machine) from dictionary attacks based on the crappy passwords that humans seem to traditionally prefer. However, /usr/sbin …

  4. Magic SysRq to xen's dom0 on a serial console

    For a normal server running with the kernel console over a serial line, you can get Magic SysRq behavior by sending a "break" signal, followed by the character of the command you want triggered. How does that work for dom0 of a Xen install?

    I've just set up a xen …

  5. trouble with umn.edu (ftp.us.debian.org) mirror?

    is anyone else having trouble accessing the debian mirror at debian-mirror.mirror.umn.edu?

    I'm in the US, and ftp.debian.org is resolving to this host for me, but the host itself is not responding (since last night, if my cron-apt logs are accurate).

    I haven't been able to …

  6. Interpreting vmstat's wait stats on linux 2.6

    I'm trying to figure out if the linux 2.6 kernel's “wait” cycles include cycles waiting on network I/O or specifically just waiting on disk access.

    If network I/O is included, it would change my interpretation of a system with spiking “wait” percentages. Maybe the disk controllers aren't …

  7. Insane clock skew on amd64 host running etch/i386

    My impression was that the i386 debian distribution could run fine on an amd64 processor (though i recognize that it wouldn't get the full benefit of the 64-bit platform).

    I have a machine which i'm trying to do this on, though, and while it's up and running, i'm getting serious …

  8. good OCR tools under debian?

    I have never needed to do Optical Character Recognition (turning scanned documents back into text form), but it appears i may soon need to (in english, FWIW).

    Does anyone have a preferred tool/suite that is packaged for debian?

    A scan of the archive turns up

    • gocr
    • ocrad
    • unpaper
    • clara …

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