One of my main frustrations with Ubuntu has always been the lack of a usable root account.

As a result, I've taken to enabling the account on all of my boxes.

All you have to do is assign a password to the account:

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and if you decide to disable the account later:

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If you do add a password to root, don't mess with the sudoers file, as if you disable root in the sudoers file and later disable the account itself, you won't be able to do anything and will have to use a livecd to fix it.

This is an old sysadmin trick, but a good one all the same.
Suppose that you finished installing a brand-new Debian GNU/Linux server, and for whatever reason you forgot to set aside some space for a swap partition. Or you correctly got some swap space at installation time but now you desperately need some more. Well, despair not. It’s a little known fact that you can have swap space in a file on top of the filesystem instead of using a dedicated block device.
This simple recipe will give you 2Gb of swap space. Here we go:

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Now add this newly created swap space to your /etc/fstab:

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Theoretically, you won’t get the same performance as using a dedicated block device, and if the file actually gets fragmented it might drop rigt to the floor, so if you try this at all do it as soon as possible after installation. So if what you’re trying to do is to *increase* your available swap space instead, you may add a priority option to give preference to the block-device swap space:

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And just this time activate the swapspace with addswap (The initscripts will do it on every boot thereafter):

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That’s all there is to it.