Lenny apt configs

A friend of mine, Major, asked for a little advice on Debian apt configuration for a stable production server. Over the years, I have learned a few little things with regards to apt configuration with sane access to newer backports and/or testing/unstable/alpha apt repositories, and particularly one gotcha when a new stable release is completed.

One of my favorite apt preference resources is maintained by Roderick Schertler, and I always keep his apt pinning page listed in my /etc/apt/preferences file.

I track Debian stable (currently “Lenny”) on production servers and upgrade only software that is absolutely necessary from backports or testing – the gotcha I mention above is when Debian releases a new “stable” (“Squeeze” is next). Without “oldstable” listed in the preferences file at a higher priority than “stable”, you might be in for a surprise one day with a long list of packages set to be upgraded to the new “stable” 😉 This is not particularly desirable in a production environment that will require a good deal of work to make sure a dist-upgrade to the new stable release will function properly.

On my workstations and laptop, I typically roll along with the “testing” (currently “Squeeze) apt repositories and update/upgrade daily for that new software fresh feeling. I use the same apt configurations and simply bump the testing preference to 910. This allows me to do things like ‘apt-cache policy $FOO’ to see what versions of a package are in all the releases, without trolling around packages.d.o.

Here’s a tarball of my Lenny apt configs and the contents:

/etc/apt/apt.conf – set lenny as the default release and bump the cache limit a lot higher

APT::Default-Release "lenny";
APT::Cache-Limit 33554432;

/etc/apt/sources.list – Lenny/testing/sid along with security, backports, debian-multimedia, and alpha kernel builds

# Lenny
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

# Testing
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free

# Sid
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

# Experimental
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

#####
# Lenny Backports
deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free
deb-src http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

# Debian Multimedia
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main
deb-src http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main

# buildserver.net kernel buildd repo
# http://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel
deb http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel/ trunk main
deb-src http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/debian-kernel/ trunk main

/etc/apt/preferences – the magic to not dork up a stable box.. read Roderick’s pinning page for really great explanations on how this all works

Explanation: see http://www.argon.org/~roderick/apt-pinning.html
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=oldstable
Pin-Priority: 905

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
Pin-Priority: 400

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 300

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

Package: *
Pin: origin www.backports.org
Pin-Priority: 600

Package: *
Pin: origin www.debian-multimedia.org
Pin-Priority: 600

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian-Kernel,a=kernel-dists-trunk
Pin-Priority: 200

What’s (not) in my bag..

I have a flight in the morning, so thought I would clean out my backpack a bit and lighten the load, and it dawned on me after unloading that I should take a picture to embarrass remind myself to keep it minimal.. Lifehacker has been running a “What’s in our bags” series, and the crap in my backpack is quite opposite from the sparse contents of most of the Lifehacker staff posts..

The contents of the Swiss Army Ishouldreallygetasmallerone backpack:
(only things on the table that weren’t in the bag were keys, wallet, and Roxane..)
ThinkPad T60
power supply (plugged in the wall)
lens wipes
Band Aids
baggie with 2 travel toothbrushes, 2 half-empty little tooth paste tubes, Advil, Advil PM, ear plugs, mobile phone ear piece, and emergency nicotine gum
a new toothbrush
Blackberry and USB cable
multi-size memory card reader and USB cable
2 external drives and USB cables – one for music and one for encrypted machine backups
iPod Classic, ear buds, and cable
2 USB flash drives
checkbook
travel document case
mini stereo cable for iPod2RentalCar
trusty Olympus XA
more emergency nic-fit-fix-gum
two black bracelets (SEP and HTFU)
library card
large and small nail clippers
old iPod Shuffle
Olympus FE-115 and case with extra batteries and media cards
ear buds
..and another pair of ear buds
wireless mouse
Sharpie and mechanical pencil
SD/MMC USB media card reader with media card in it
MicroSD adapter
a couple empty media card holders
Barnes and Noble gift card from Xmas
sticky note pad
Debian Lenny Netinst mini CD, a blank CDR, and a flip case of Microsoft Windows crap (for helping others, not for me..)
AT&T mobile broadband dongle goodness
key for my office lappy lock
lappy screen wipe
Mini-Mag light
office access card lanyard
spare crackberry battery
mini-to-1/4″ stereo adapter
2 ethernet cables
yet another USB cable
the take-with-me lappy lock
travel itinerary printout
last year’s Debconf Proceedings
very important mail that needed to be looked into (unread for months..)

um, yeah.. all that..

The Order of the Blue Polo

I just got my blue polo from the OpenNMS guys, and had to write a quick post on the certificate included in the package. It says:

Certificate of Merit
Let this Certify that
Michael Shuler
has demonstrated outstanding judgment in becoming a member of
The Order of the Blue Polo

What can we say? Although “bestest” isn’t a word, it should be, cause that’s what you are: The Bestest. You have all the intelligence of those people on Star Trek with the big foreheads, but you have really cool, normal foreheads. People Magazine won’t run your picture because they are afraid of making the models mad. Thank you so much for talking about OpenNMS until you are blue in the face. You are the reason we exist.

OpenNMS
Tarus Balog, Project Maintainer

Blackberry Event Log

Just found this via a http://forums.crackberry.com/ while attempting to troubleshoot some issues I’m having with MMS message retrieval, as well as send errors on my new Curve 8310 – google the common error “Could not retrieve message content. Try again later.” (lots of possible config options to try, and none are working for me, yet). Being a sysadmin, I wanted to know where the heck is the log of why you couldn’t xyz.. Here it is:

Press and hold the ALT key. While holding down ALT, type ‘lglg‘ – that’s lowercase el-gee-el-gee. Start digging through the logs – there’s an option to enable INFO and DEBUG level logging, too 🙂

(I am seeing a good number of DNS failures upon attempts to retrieve messages and trying to send to valid addresses with strong signal, AT&T..)