Installing and using the IPMI tool
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standardized computer system interface used by system administrators to manage a computer system and monitor its operation.
The development of this interface specification was led by Intel Corporation and is supported by more than two hundred computer systems vendors including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and NEC Corporation.
1. Install the ipmitool which is used to send commands and receive information from the management interface.
apt-get install ipmitool
Installing and configuring Unison File Synchronizer
Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.
1. Install the Unison package
apt-get install unison
Installing and configuring PPTP VPN server on lenny
If you would like to setup a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for Windows clients, PPTP is a great choice. It's easy to set up on the server and you don't need any additional software for the Windows clients to connect.
1. Install the required packages
apt-get install pptpd
Using Debian Volatile to keep your packages updated
Some packages aim at fast moving targets, such as spam filtering and virus scanning, and even when using updated data patterns, they do not really work for the full time of a stable release. The main goal of volatile is allowing system administrators to update their systems in a nice, consistent way, without getting the drawbacks of using unstable, even without getting the drawbacks for the selected packages. So debian-volatile will only contain changes to stable programs that are necessary to keep them functional.
Add an additional IP address to your server
1. Open the network configuration file (pico /etc/network/interfaces)
Check the name of your network interface. You should see a line similar to this one: "iface eth0 inet static". In my case the name is eth0.
Add these lines to the end of the file:
auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
address 192.168.1.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
network 192.168.1.0
Upgrade from etch to lenny
Debian has released a stable version of Debian 5.0 (lenny). If you're running previous version of Debian, you can easily upgrade.
1. Update all packages currently installed to the latest etch versions
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade