At times, in systems configured to use both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses the debian package manager (apt / apt-get / aptitude) uses IPv6 by default for outgoing connections and fails to resolve/connect. The solution is to force it to use IPv4

Add -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true when running apt-get or apt.

If you want to make the setting persistent just create /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99force-ipv4 and put Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true"; in it:

echo 'Acquire::ForceIPv4 "true";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99force-ipv4

phpMyAdmin being the most used tool for managing MySQL databases comes as a package with Debian and works out of the box with “apt-get” along with apache, php and mysql.

But, when switching over to suPHP from the apache mod_php plugin, even if every other things work, phpMyAdmin fails.

The error looks like:

File does not exist: /usr/share/phpmyadmin/navigation.php<, referer: http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

This is because its configured to work only for mod_php. The configuration file is located at “/etc/phpmyadmin/apache2.conf”, which is symbolically linked at “/etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf”

The easier option is to enable “mod_php” by typing in “a2enmod php5” as described at Sysadmin World.

Everytime, when I do a fresh installation of Debian, I come across the issue of mounting USB drives. Since all the USB drives I connect are of NTFS partition, spends time on searching issues related to NTFS and finally sorts out the issue, which has nothing to do with NTFS.

The error is caused by an entry in the “/etc/fstab” file, which contains the configurations for mounding drives. Since I use Pen drives for installation, an entry is created for the device during installation, detected as “/dev/sdb1”, which is the second disk after the internal hard disk.

The first partition of all usb devices plugged in first will be detected as “sdb1”, and the entry in “fstab” file prevents mounting it. To get rid of the issue, just delete the line starting with “/dev/sdb1” in the “fstab” file.

Being a netizen, its a long time ambition for me to be self sufficient to run the basic online services needed. Basic services for me on internet include:

• Mail
• Website / Blog
• Storage / Data Sync
• Contacts
• Calender
• IM

Earlier, these were distributed over multiple providers, but now mostly revolves around Google. GMail for Mail, Google Analytics in Websites, Google drive for cloud storage, again Google Contacts, GTalk/Hangouts, Google+, etc. So, its also an effort to get out of Google services with minimum effect on usability.

Being a Debian user, I always like to experiment with the latest packages, and so I have many third party debian repositories listed in the sources.list file. Whenever I am adding it for the first time, I usually get the error:

“The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available”

On googling multiple solutions can be found to add a public key using apt-key, but most of them has 3 or 4 commands, including downloading the key, move it to a file and then import. But the one line command that does the same is as below:

apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver_url --recv-keys key_id