Wake On LAN

I have two computers at home connected to my WRT54GL (a variant of WRT54G) through cables. Using SSH i can easily shut down my computer, and using Wake On Lan, I can wake them up again when I need them. Here are some of my notes after setting up the wake on LAN:

  1. You need to activate wake on LAN feature in the BIOS.
  2. You need to set your network card to wake on LAN using ethtool. This command needs to be inserted to your startup/network script, because in each restart you will need to set it again.
  3. Some network card will wake using the program wol, but some must use etherwake.
  4. Wake on LAN only works in cable/wired connection (wireless connection will not work).

Switching from Fedora to Debian

Fedora is good, and gets updated every 6 months, but sometimes I think it is too fast for me. In every new version, they will change some daemon that breaks a lot of things that I have painfully set up in the previous version. After thinking about it, I try to use Debian. After few weeks using it, I already felt comfortable with it. I am also happy because I found a nearby Debian mirror in Thailand (http://www.debianclub.org) which is very fast to access from my home. Here are some things that you may need to know about debian:

Network configuration is at /etc/network/interfaces
Some useful apt-get commands are:
apt-get install packagename
apt-get remove packagename
apt-get clean (otherwise you will use a large disk space for package cache)

some useful dpkg commands:
dpkg -l to list all installed packages
dpkg -L packagename to list files in that package
dpkg -S /path/to/file to check to which package that file belongs

Another useful command is update-alternatives to update alternatives for a program (use this after installing java, etc)

I found a link about someone asking for Debian tips (he is a FreeBSD guy), and the answers he gets is quite good, I think the answers are applicable to anyone switching from another Unix or another Linux distro to debian): http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/234.