Encrypted swap in Debian
So, you got your home directory encryopted, but you're not sure what sensitive material could end up in swap? After a long day of running a whole lot of applications and processes, many interesting things could potentially wind up there. So here's how to make sure that data is completely garbled after a reboot.
irssi auto-connect and auto-identify
There are loads of irssi scripts which do this, but the truth is irssi actually supports these things very well out of the box. Here's how.
Disable the “No mail” notification on machines which have no local mail
On machines which are set up to have no local mail and send all their messages to a smarthost, using e.g. exim4, the "No mail." message at login is both unnecessary and annoying, because when things are set up correctly, there should never be any local mail in the first place.
This can be remedied by editing /etc/pam.d/ssh (or whichever file corresponds to the login method you're using) and taking a look at the two following lines:
# Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login. session optional pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1]
It's time to comment something out 
Disable Debian’s motd on login
Tired of seeing this?
Linux ***** 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Fri Jun 6 22:22:11 UTC 2008 i686 The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Last login: ***** from *****
Edit /etc/motd, remove everything in it, or 'echo "" > /etc/motd'
Then edit /etc/rcS.d/S55bootmisc.sh and comment out the two lines following "#Update motd"
How to reset the root password on a Debian machine
Today I had to bring up an old virtual machine which was used to test some homebrew modifications to the apache webserver. The root password, of course, was nowhere to be found. What can you do?
Where to rename network interfaces in debian etch
Has your desired eth0 ended up as eth1 and the other way around? Did you put in a new network card, having every config file set to use eth0, and the card shows up as eth1?