The quickest way to disable autostart of services in Debian is to utilize a convenient curses interface to selectively choose which services to autostart in different run levels. Its so much easier to use than update-rc.d.  Its good for instances where you are migrating services out of an existing box, such as removing the mysql server without uninstalling.

The package is called:
sysv-rc-conf

(Install it using aptitude or apt-get install)

If you install the amanda-client package on Debian, some things need to be configured before you can actually use the service. By default, the server will not be able to connect to the client. The common error is: “selfcheck request failed: timeout waiting for ACK”. Read the post for the solution.

Here’s the fix for the common error with ScpOnly when using the Jail SFTP option. The error message for WinSCP clients is “WinSCP: this is end-of-file:0 failed with invalid output” when trying to connect to a SFTP server. View the post to see the fix for WinSCP.

I recently installed Mailman with Exim4, which was a challenge considering all the manual configuration you have to do. I found a few guides on the install, but they didn’t seem to be “complete” enough to get the system working. Turns out, the biggest challenge was Exim4. The configuration files are confusing, especially since there are two sets of configuration files.

One thing I’ve encountered with Awstats is adding in old apache log files. This is useful if you are migrating data from servers. By default, Awstats will ignore ALL past dates in the log that occur before the most recent log entry date. In order to avoid Awstats from finding the “recent log entry date”, you will need move all Awstats cached files into a separate folder.