Seeking good web sites for Debian tools

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,

> Version control: subversion vs CVS?

subversion can be used as a drop-in replacement for CVS, IMHO.
I havn't really used arch, except for checking out the source for the
"enigma" package in experimental. I had the impression that arch is
quite slow and uses a lot of diskspace, so I guess I'm going to stick to
Subversion. I'm looking forward to this upcoming canonical SCM, though.

> Domain name server: bind v9 vs djbdns?

Never use djb. Don't use qmail, even if you like ezmlm. While these apps
are probably more secure than others (but bind9 is widely used, and I
don't remember any serious problem with it for years), they sometimes
(qmail) suffer a lot from its licence and design.
For mail, for example I'm very happy to have switched from a seriously
patched qmail-ldap (qmail is like lacking lots of features you want) to
postfix.
IIRC djbdns doesn't support remote zone updates. You can get that pretty
secure by just not giving bind write rights to the zones it is not
supposed to change...
I have CNAME entries in my main zone that point to entries in my
"dynamic" zone. Updates are RSA authenticated, using the DNS protocol.

> Firewall: Linux netfilter-iptables vs openBSD packet filter?

iptables is just fine. I have no idea what openBSD pf might be able to
do better, actually...

> Sys admin: Is cfengine worth the effort to learn & use?

Never used it.

> How to handle fax at home w/ Linux?

Since I have a digital line at home (ISDN), and only few ISDN cards
support fax with Linux (some more do with closed-source drivers, but
these don't work on my "new" 2.6 kernels) I havn't tried that either.
Check out the hylafax and efax packages.

> Please let me know of any web sites that have high quality (and current)  
> content on these topics, that might not be listed in Google's top 10-20-30  
> for the usual search terms.

I always use google for these and ask my friends on IRC about their
experience.

regards,
Erich