Posts Tagged ‘debian’

Debian is departing (if ever so slightly) from the historical mantra “It ships when its ready”.

Looks as if Debian has decided time based freeze schedules will help them better manage time. Note they are not adopting time based releases, only the freeze is time based. I personally think this is a good thing. It will still ship when its ready but at least there will be some semblance of a time line for new releases. Thoughts?

Read the announcement here.

I typically use /etc/cron.d to store all of my system crontabs. I recently ran into an issue that I had either not run into before, or fixed and paid no attention to. Files stored in /etc/cron.d/ or any /etc/cron.* directory need to adhear to the run-parts Debian cron script namespace which consists is

(^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$)

for the regex impared this does not include the dot character. If you have a file in /etc/cron.d/ that has a dot in it it will not be evaluated by cron. I have seen mention of underscore not being valid but in my testing underscore was not an issue, only dots.

Recently I ordered a server with Debian etch. Unfortunately during testing I noticed that startx was on the system, along with a whole slew of other junk that I don’t generally want on a fresh server. I wanted to remove all of the cruft but I didn’t have the exact package list. (more…)