I was charged of implementing a tunnel with RObust Header Compression (ROHC). Boss asked me which server you want to do the job? Naturally, I said Ubuntu. He said, OK, I’ll give you Debian. I said to myself it shouldn’t be a hassle Ubuntu and Debian are same. Ubuntu is derived from it. But to my surprise, Debian seems to be another Operating System completely.

sudo

First surprise, Debian doesn’t comes with sudo. On my VPS on which i had only root account, I installed sudo and created another user instead of root directly


# adduser nayar sudo
# apt-get install sudo
# su nayar
$ sudo blah blah...


When I installed Debian in my VirtualBox, it would ask a password for root and another password for the user. If i remember well, Ubuntu doesn’t asks for password for root. Do you think it’s a security issue for user root to have a password? My gut says so. Not proven.

Certificate Authority (CA) with OpenSSL

I was following a tutorial which says run the following code

/etc/ssl/misc/CA.pl -newca/usr/lib/ssl/misc/CA.pl -newca

apt-get install

The following command would yield the same results on Ubuntu as well as on Debian. They’re classics.

# apt-get install gcc cmake build-essentials git

But for other stuffs, gotta hunt real hard to know which package is providing for x library or modules. Why are there these diferences? grrrrr

Anyways, these differences are making me learn a lot but delays my work though.