We have an existing email infrastructure running uw-imapd and exim4 on Debian GNU/Linux Etch and needed to hook up a Nokia E71 mobile telephone to this existing setup.

The existing infrastructure has run without issue for many years. However the E71 would take a minute or so to retrieve just a single email. Therefore some alternatives were tried.

PostgreSQL weekly news reports that ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 now supports PostgreSQL. This enhancement allows businesses to obtain the full benefits of PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB alongside an established ArcGIS installation.

This brief HOWTO is based on the excellent article from Oracle detailing how to build a RAC cluster on GNU/Linux using ASM as the storage medium. It also pulls some information from this other great article though I used an iSCSI SAN for shared storage.

It is assumed that the Etch distribution of Debian GNU/Linux is used. The Linux kernel that this was tested on was version 2.6.18-4-686.

This brief HOWTO shows how a simple Debian DEB package file can be built. To keep it simple, various shortcuts have been taken and assumptions have been made.

• The package will be usable for the i386 architecture only.
• The source code will not be available (e.g. via apt-get source). This means that the package will be non-free.
• The Debian Policy will not be adhered to. This means that the package will not be accepted into the official Debian archive.
• By building a binary package, all the files must have permissions and ownerships that match the intended permissions and ownerships. Thus, all steps are expected to be run under the root account.

This brief HOWTO shows how a simple repository for Debian APT *.deb files can be built. To keep it simple, it assumes that the etch Debian/GNU Linux distribution is used on the i386 architecture. These steps have been tested with equal success on the sarge distribution.