Debian’s repositories contain many commonly used Perl packages, but when you need to install a package from CPAN that has not been “debianized” yet, the only option is to use the traditional “make install” approach. This is less than ideal, as it creates files in the system that are outside the package manager’s control.

dh-make-perl resolves this problem by downloading packages from CPAN and creating a “.deb” file on-the-fly. If your system lacks Internet access, you can download the packages manually and run dh-make-perl to create the “.deb” file from a locally unpacked CPAN tarball.

• Debian dh-make-perl Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, dh-make-perl, deb, cpan, perl

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The Linux resolver always tries the name servers listed in your “/etc/resolv.conf” file sequentially. As a result, a problem in the first name server on the list will slow down your connections dramatically.

One possible solution to this problem is pdnsd, a “Proxy DNS server” designed to cope with unreachable or intermittent DNS servers (a very common situation with dialup stations).

pdnsd employs “permanent caching”, and saves the contents of its queries to disk, allowing it to process DNS queries even when the upstream DNS server is down. Furthermore, it can be configured to “ping” your name servers and remove them from the list if they become temporarily unreachable. You can also configure pdnsd to use your “/etc/hosts” file as a source of information, and it will respond to “A” (name to IP) and “IN PTR” (IP to name) queries using the information found there.

• Debian pdnsd Page
• pdnsd Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, pdnsd, bind, named, DNS, nameserver, resolv.conf

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The scenario may sound horribly familiar to some: One day, your “apt-gets” suddenly stops working, and your Linux workstations cannot access the Internet anymore. A telnet to any known website, port 80, results in “Connection Refused”. You call your “IT” department, and they inform you that now the company policy requires everybody to use a proxy. “But why?”, you dare ask. The reply comes with the resolution and certainty of those without knowledge: “It’s company policy”. You kindly request the IP and port of the proxy server and configure all stations to use it, just to get a “403 forbidden” or “401 Unauthorized” on every access. What is going on here?

Congratulations. You’re now a victim of NTLM, an authentication scheme for proxies created by Microsoft, which “improves” (in the Microsoft sense of the word) upon the old “Basic” authentication, while retaining absolutely no compatibility with non-Microsoft products.

Fortunately, a charitable soul created ntlmaps, a proxy which authenticates into your upstream NTLM proxy and provides a standard proxy interface to your non-Microsoft clients. ntlmaps works extremely well, and can even re-write headers on-the-fly. ntlmaps is an absolute necessity if you need authenticate to NTLM proxies to access the Internet.

• Debian ntlmaps Page
• ntlmaps Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, ntlmaps, proxy, web proxy, NTLM

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root-tail does a “tail -f” on a number of files and displays the results on the root X-window. Unlike the traditional approach of using a terminal emulator with tail running, root-tail can monitor a number of files and display the results of each file in different colors. Transparency is preserved, meaning that text is drawn on top of your background image without disturbing it.

• Debian root-tail Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, root-tail, log, syslog, monitoring

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There’s nothing more frustrating than losing data. Any kind of data. To avoid that, the solution is to backup everything, and these days CDs and DVDs are a popular choice of backup media. But what do you do when your CD or DVD develops an I/O error? In some cases, only one file is lost (or part of it), but depending on where the problem happens in the media, the entire file structure may be rendered useless.

dares scans a CD or DVD sector by sector trying to find files. Instead of relying on the filesystem to do so, it uses the “Magic Library” to identify files, making it possible to recover files that would be lost forever otherwise.

There are two packages providing dares. The first one is just called “dares” and uses a Curses based text interface. The second is called dares-qt and provides a Qt-based version of the program.

• Debian dares Page

Keywords: Daily Debian, dares, I/O error, data-recovery

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