improving console video mode

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I wanted to improve the resolution of the console on a linux server. After reading some forums and HOWTO’s I found out that it’s very easy, you just have to add vga=MODE to your kernel parameters – where MODE stands for the desired screen resolution.The possible screen resolultions are listet here. These values are hexadecimal so vga=791 stands for 1024×768 and 16 Bit Colors (0×317).

mounting SATA disk on startup

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A friend of mine had trouble with his VDR based on Debian Sarge – he added a SATA disk, partitioned, formatted an mounted it, added an entry in/etc/fstab and everything seemed to be fine – until he rebooted.When the system booted the disk was not mounted automatically at the mount point defined in /etc/fstab. After logging in and typing mount -athe disk was mounted correctly.

The problem was that the required modules for SATA were not loaded early enough. To fix this I did the following:

  1. Add the required module in the correct order in/etc/mkinitrd/modules (scsi_mpd, sata_via, sd_mod)
  2. Run mkinitrd -o /boot/new_initrd_filename
  3. Changed line initrd of desired boot menu entry in/boot/grub/menu.lst to name of new initrd file
  4. Reboot

new debian mail server

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Today I finished the setup of my new mail server. Based on the recently released Sarge 3.1 I used the following configuration:

Of course the web interface and the IMAP server are only accessibly through a secure connection.

All the packages used for this configuration can be found in the debian repositories and were easy to install with apt-get. The configuration of the components was not to hard though there were some tricky things (I never thought it could be complicated to get apache2 running in secure mode only – see).

Maybe I’ll write a short HOWTO about it.