How to force reconfiguring of a package?
Hi folks,
I have two questions related to Debian package management.
1) My apache server doesn't start up. When I manually try to start it, it
complains that it can't figure out the hostname of the local system.
Weird, because "hostname" returns the correct name. Anyway, I suspect that
something went wrong during the post-installation configuration, so I'd
like to re-run that script. dpkg --configure <package.deb>, however,
doesn't want to do anything on the grounds that the package is already
properly set up. Un-installing and re-installing seems a bit like
overkill, and dselect of course bitches a lot about the stuff that
depends on a web server and wants to uninstall it, too (I know I can force
dselect to keep those things, but it's easy to fuck up anyway). So my
question actually comes down to a special and a general one:
1a) Why dosn't apache know the name of its host, and where does it try to
get it from?
1b) How to re-configure an already installed and configured package?
2) Since I also have plenty of non-debian related trouble with this
computer, I have installed Debian for the third time now. Is it possible
to save the entire setup of the system in such a way (preferably on a
floppy disk) that for a re-installation all I would have to do is pop in
the distribution disk and the saved installation, go and drink coffee, and
come back to the ready-installed system an hour later? This would also be
interesting if one wanted to set up a lot of computers in a row. BTW, on
my first two installation the apache server started up without trouble. I
don't know what I did differently.
**Daniel
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