Recovering deleted images from flash cards 

Chances are if you have a digital camera writing images to a SDHC card, or some similar card, at some point you've accidentally deleted images from it. Here we're going to walk-through the process of retrieving deleted images from a card using the testdisk suite of tools.

Installing Oracle11 on Debian Lenny 

The main goal is to get the Oracle installer to run so you can install Oracle successfully. This application has to be run within X windows. We will use vnc for that, this is not necessary, but you may (often) find you have to install Oracle remotely. And using something like vnc sure beats spending time in a noisy server room.

Running IPv6 in practice 

Many articles tell us about about initial setup of IPv6 and are completely silent about what to do next. Thus, I wanted to share my own experience.

Securely erasing files, by filling your disk 

With modern filesystems securely deleting files isn't always easy, but one approach which stands a good chance of working is to write random patterns over all unused areas of a disk - thus erasing the contents of files you've previously deleted.

Creating Bind DNS-Entries with regular dyndns-clients in routers 

Recently there was a message posted upon the debian-user-german mailing list asking if there is a way to create BIND-compliant DNS-Updates with regulars dyndns-clients from routers. The Idea behind this is to get rid of dyndns.org services and provide an independent way to maintain dynamic dns entries for boxes without a static ip-address without the need of dyndns providers. The goal was to create a text file which could be used as input for nsupdate with cron to run it frequently.

Service Failover with heartbeat? 

I have got e.g. two servers with Apache and Postfix and a virtual IP (from heartbeat-1). Well, heartbeat is working well and it is simple to deal with complete server outages, but how can I configure heartbeat, so that it also switches the server, if one of the above services fail?

Connect to Informix using PHP5 on Lenny x86_64 

After much trial and error, I have a Debian Lenny x86_64 server with apache2, php5, and connectivity to an Informix database server. Here are the steps I went through. Much of this information I found at http://devzone.zend.com/article/4290 (http://devzone.zend.com/article/4290).

Handling network mounts on a very mobile laptop? 

I have a laptop that travels with me to work as well as being used at home. I have a number of network CIFS mounts that I like to have available when I am at home, so I have them set to "auto" in /etc/fstab. When I am at work, I use a Mobile Broadband card to connect to the Internet. When at home, I typically use Ethernet.

Speeding up dynamic websites via an nginx proxy 

Many of us are familiar with the use of Apache for hosting websites. It might not be the fastest webserver but it is extraordinarily popular, extremely flexible, and a great choice for most people. However there are times when it can struggle, and placing a proxy in front of it can be useful.

Offline Package Management for APT 

This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline.