Well, it seems that the problems in the previous post were "solved" by removing most of the gui-related files, including gnome, kde and the X server. After about half an hour to an hour, everything perked up and returned to the previous state before installing all the unstable packages. Thus did aptitude undo whatever problems were caused by apparently cleanly removing whatever was inhibiting performance. I can't say I understand what was going on, but at least one is able to backtrack to a certain extent.

At least it proves the designation "unstable" is somewhat deserved, and that using packages from that distribution is potentially harmful to a working setup - if it isn't broken, don't upgrade. Not a bad rule to follow, especially for a machine running a number of servers.

To start with I was using the stable sarge distribution and everything was running nicely. Proftpd had started off responding slowly but seemed to sort itself out somehow. I could log into the machine from work using ssh and the webserver was fast.

Purely because I wanted to install php5 from the unstable distribution did I add the source to my sources.list, which caused aptitude to flag many packages for an upgrade, on the whole held back at the stable versions. Somehow this got very confused when I tried to install php5 and associated stuff, where some things got upgraded, and other things were uninstalled for no particular reason (such as gnome and kde). I think I ended up with an unstable system eventually, and apt did work pretty well, but now the system is configured somewhat differently. Apache 2 has gone sluggish and so has proftpd. I can't seem to access the ssh server. This morning I found the X server had died overnight.

In my efforts to set up a DNS server properly, with a zone for my own local domain, I have found that Webmin is quite useful, or rather the module for maintaining the BIND configuration (package webmin-bind).

I was getting initially confused by zone files, and where the webmin module is handy is getting the file started, and probably avoiding a number of commmon syntax problems. Also, if you need to update the zone configuration that is also very easy.

However, I find that in this case the module could be a little more helpful in describing what it's doing. In general Webmin modules assume a lot of knowledge about configuration parameters with little description about what they actually do. For inexperienced users, some help on each configuration page would be beneficial, while experienced users could just turn it off. Also, for actually setting things up, a wizard-like process could be set up where the user is guided through a task over several pages. Aside from the ease-of-use element, such an arrangement may help avoid errors in configuration even for experienced administrators, and that would be particularly useful for something as fiddly as BIND.

Webmin is another handy package I'd not discovered before, providing a web interface for some of the common administration tasks, such as setting up users and mounting volumes. Definitely worth a try for those who don't enjoy working with text configuration files.

The only thing I don't understand is why it's so slow to respond (on my system). While apache is running nice and quick, webmin can take up to 30 seconds to bring back a page.

Incidentally I have a similar trouble with proftpd, which also responds a little slowly, but only on the local network - accessed from the outside it's fine.

This is the second time I've tried Debian, and this time the samba configuration was somewhat annoying. It seems that the standard smb.conf file that gets installed with the samba package is a little too advanced for its own good. After some hours of wondering why I couldn't connect to the samba server from my windows machine, I ended up creating the config file from scratch, using the simple example in the howto. I'm not sure why the default config file caused trouble, but this post may at least help some others struggling with samba.