The Debian Administrator's Handbook

The next chapters will be a more detailed tour of the system, starting with basic infrastructure and services (chapters 8 to 10) and going progressively up the stack to reach the user applications in chapter 13. Chapter 12 deals with more advanced subjects that will most directly concern administrators of large sets of computers (including servers), while chapter 14 is a brief introduction to the wider subject of computer security and gives a few keys to avoid most problems.

Chapter 15 is for administrators who want to go further and create their own Debian packages.

VOCABULARY Debian package

A Debian package is an archive containing all the files required to install a piece of software. It is generally a file with a .deb extension, and it can be handled with the dpkg command. Also called binary package, it contains files that can be directly used (such as programs or documentation). On the other hand, a source package contains the source code for the software and the instructions required for building the binary package.

The present English version is based on the fifth edition of the French book. This fifth edition was an important update, covering version 6.0 of Debian, code-named Squeeze. Among the changes, Debian now sports two new architectures — kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 — based on the FreeBSD kernel and supporting the associated technologies (jails, packet filter and so on). On Linux-based architectures, the 2.6.32 kernel extends support to all the main virtualization technologies (Xen/OpenVZ/LXC/KVM, see Section 12.2, “Virtualization”). All included packages have obviously been updated. Many improvements specifically target package maintainers, who can now use a simplified debian/rules (with debhelper's dh command); they also benefit from a standard patch management system integrated to dpkg-source (by using the 3.0 (quilt) source package format).

We have added some notes and remarks in sidebars. They have a variety of roles: they can draw attention to a difficult point, complete a notion of the case study, define some terms, or serve as reminders. Here is a list of the most common of these sidebars:

BACK TO BASICS: a reminder for some information that is supposed to be known;

VOCABULARY: defines a technical term, sometimes Debian specific;

COMMUNITY: highlights important persons or roles within the project;

POLICY: a rule or recommendation from the Debian Policy. This document is essential within the project, and describes how to package software. The parts of policy highlighted in this book bring direct benefits to users (for example, knowing that the policy standardizes the location of documentation and examples makes it easy to find them even in a new package).

TOOL: presents a relevant tool or service;

IN PRACTICE: theory and practice do not always match; these sidebars contain advice resulting from our experience. They can also give detailed and concrete examples;

other more or less frequent sidebars are rather explicit: CULTURE, TIP, CAUTION, GOING FURTHER, SECURITY, and so on.

5. Acknowledgments

5.1. A Bit of History

In 2003, Nat Makarevitch contacted me (Raphaël) because he wanted to publish a book on Debian in the Cahier de l'Admin (Admin's Handbook) collection that he was managing for Eyrolles, a leading French editor of technical books. I immediately accepted to write it. The first edition came out on 14th October 2004 and was a huge success — it was sold out barely four months later.

Since then, we have released 4 other editions of the French book, one for each subsequent Debian release. Roland Mas, who started working on the book as my proofreader, gradually became its co-author.

While we were obviously satisfied with the book's success, we always hoped that Eyrolles would convince an international editor to translate it into English. We had received numerous comments explaining how the book helped people to get started with Debian, and we were keen to have the book benefit more people in the same way.

Alas, no English-speaking editor that we contacted was willing to take the risk of translating and publishing the book. Not put off by this small setback, we decided to negotiate with our French editor Eyrolles to recuperate the necessary rights to translate the book into English and to try to publish it ourselves.

5.2. A Crowd-Funded Translation

Translating a book of 450 pages is a considerable effort that requires several months of work. For self-employed people like Roland and me, we had to ensure a minimum income to mobilize the time necessary to complete the project. So we set up a crowd-funding campaign on Ulule and asked people to pledge money towards the project.

→ http://www.ulule.com/debian-handbook/