IT Knowledge Base

Create Groups
# group add finance
# group add development
# group add others

Create User and Assign to Groups
# useradd –m –g finance –G development,others –s /bin/csh testuser

Information about a User
# id testuser
# groups testuser

Modify and Delete a User
# usermod testuser
# userdel –r testuser

Deactivate User Account
# usermod –L testuser

Switch to a user and move to home directory
# su – testuser

Set a Password for a User
# passwd testuser

Set Password Policies
# chage testuser

User, Groups and Password Database
# /etc/passwd
# /etc/groups
# /etc/shadow

Template Directory for Home Folder
# /etc/skel/

Edit the file with vim:
# vi /etc/inputrc

Remove comment:
set bell-style none

Or I prefer actually to have it visually displayed:
set bell-style visible

After that you need to restart debian.

Add Service with default runlevels:
# update-rc.d apache2 defaults

Add Service with custom runlevels:
# update-rc.d apache2 start 50 2 3 4 5 . stop 50 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 .

Remove Service:
# update-rc.d -f apache2 remove

More Infos you can get here:
http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-manage-services-with-update-rc.d

1. Install Kernel Heaeders

1. Get the Kernel version and remember it with:
   uname-r
2. apt-get install linux-headers-[Kernel Version]

2. Install VMWare Tools

1. Choose “install and upgrade VMWTools in VMWare” in your VM menu
2. mount /dev/hda /media/cdrom
3. cd /media/cdrom/
4. cp VMWareTools[whateverversion]tar.gz /tmp/
5. cd /tmp
6. tar xvzf VMWareTools[whateverversion]tar.gz
7. umount /media/cdrom/
8. cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/
9. make a symlink:
   ln –s /usr/src/linux-headers-[Kernel Version] /usr/src/linux
10. apt-get install gcc-4.1
11. change using gcc version:
    export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1
12. I had make and killall missing on my installation so can you get it:
    apt-get install psmisc make
13. ./vmware-install.pl

3. Uninstall VMWare Tools
After a failed installation of VMWare Tools I got following message:
A previous installation of VMWare Software has been detected… You may want to re-install VMWare Tools.

The solution was to run the uninstaller first and run the VMWare setup again:
1. ./vmware-uninstall.pl

Important: use two “-” before set!

I noticed that each time I restarted my os I didn’t get an IP and I had to start dhclient manually. So how do you get dhclient to start at startup?

Here are the steps you need to do:
1. vi etc/init.d/local

And put following code:

2. Make the file executable

3. Put it into the autostart

The smaller the number is the earlier the file will be executed.

I don’t have a lot of experience in Linux environment but anyway I got the job to install a new webserver at my work. The old server was running on debian already so I decided to take the same linux distribution.

The newest ISO you get from here from here:
www.debian.org

For my installation I just needed the CD1. Because I wanted to try it out first I decided to install debian on VMWare Server. So I booted the ISO file in VMWare and did the standard installation without the GUI. We don’t really need a GUI (Graphic User Interface) for a web server. The installation is actually straight forward.

So now we are logged in as root and are in the command line. So what now???

Follow the instructions on this webpage:
www.mysql-apache-php.com

I actually got some error when I tried to install apache and php with apt-get. To add some more sources to the apt source.list file solved the problem.

To edit the source do following:

You might want to use your own source list. This one worked for me: