Notes about stuff I always add to my Debian installs.

1. Jove - my favorite text editor.  I can use vim when I have to, but Jove is my standby.
2. apt-listchanges - list the changelog and news of updated packages so you can see what has changed and if there is anything you need to be aware of.
3. apticron - Email when there are new packages to update.
   1. Set apticron to only update at a certain time each day, and only during weekdays.  Edit /etc/cron.d/apticron, 6:50am 0-5 dow  (53 6 * * 1-5)
   2. Edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and set Email= to email address you want to be notified at.
4. apt proxy - setup a user script so that apt will try several different proxy's, then connect direct if no proxy is available.
   1. http://askubuntu.com/questions/53443/how-do-i-ignore-a-proxy-if-not-available
5. zabbix-agentd - Ties into the zabbix monitorying system.
   1. Add debian specific userparameters to /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf.d/ so debian version and outstanding updates are available.
6. psmisc - adds a few process related tools, I use pstree the most.
7. atop - a vastly enhanced version of top that adds a bunch of extra features.
8. dpkg-reconfigure tzdata - set correct timezone
9. sudo - add my user to the sudo group so no editing of /etc/sudoers required.  adduser <username> sudo
10. fail2ban - if server has publicly accessible services - setup fail2ban to rate limit auth failures.
11. salt-minion - Salt Stack agent for remote execution and configuration.  May need to add the salt stack debian repo.  salt-key -a on master to add client.
12. Smartmontools - to monitor smart values of hard drives if this isn't a VM.

apt-get install jove apt-listchanges apticron zabbix-agentd psmisc atop salt-minion

Zabbix Debian Additions

Create "/etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf.d/debian_userparameters.conf"

#Debian Version
UserParameter=system.sw.debianversion,cat /etc/debian_version

#Debian updates available
UserParameter=system.sw.debianupdates,apt-get dist-upgrade -s  |sed -n 's/^\([0-9]\+\) upgraded.*/\1/p'

UserParameter=system.sw.debianupdates-list,apt-get dist-upgrade -s  |sed -n 's/^Inst \(.*\) (.*/\1,/p' | tr '\n' ' '

Zabbix Smart Monitoring

Create "etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.d/smart.conf"

serParameter=hdd.smartraw[*],sudo smartctl -A /dev/$1|fgrep -m1 $2|awk '{print $$10}'
UserParameter=hdd.smart[*],sudo smartctl -A /dev/$1|fgrep -m1 $2|awk '{print $$4}'