David's questions

Today, I accidentally swapped the hard drive on my computer while my company is in sleep mode then turn it on. After the computer restarts, I can't boot into Windows anymore. The problem is that it keeps giving me the screen where I have the option to launch system repair, but when I do that, it puts me right back to that same screen. When I select boot normally, it just goes into a restart loop.

I tried to use the hard drive on another PC as a secondary drive just so I can recover as much of the data as possible. When I do that, I can't access the users' folders which contained all the important data, but all else such as Program Files works. The error message is "Access is denied." I can't seem to be able to change the ownership of the folder to me so that I can read it either?

So are my data lost?

I have just installed Debian and I was just installing some packages using apt-get instal when I saw this message:

debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed

What does this mean? And once I have installed apt-utils how can configure the packages?

I just set up a pptp server on Debian Linux and I can connect to the server from my iPhone when in the same network as the PPTP server. But when I leave my office network, I can't connect to the vpn. On the router, I have forwarded port 1723 for PPTP but still no luck.

Thx

I just set up a pptp server on Debian Linux yesterday by following this guide: http://poptop.sourceforge.net/dox/debian-howto.phtml When I tried to connect to the server using both XP and iOS, the client successfully connects to the PPTP server, however, I can't seem to access the Internet thru the pptp connection. When I tried to capture traffic using tcpdump on just the pptp interface itself, I can see only outgoing traffic and no incoming traffic at all. (Please see image)

Is there a way to reconfigure Debian so that it could install the essential packages and configuration files? The files/packages that are missing includes the sudoer file, tcpdump, nano and a lot more. Can someone recommend a list of essential packages for Debian so I can install it manually? I am pretty sure the Linux I have is the bare minimum.

For some reason I edited motd file yesterday from the standard "Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY..." to my own customized message. After a system restart today, my customized message is gone and it's back to:

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.

How can I make my own message permanent? BTW, I am using Debian 6.

I just installed Debian 6 on my server and noticed that sshd isn't writing any log to /var/log. I understand this is a huge security issue as I won't be able to know who logged in to my server. Is there anyway to fix this?

how long does Apache keep access log?

For some reason, Apache is not generating logs in /var/log/httpd/access_log. How do I see if logging enabled?