[Gllug] Linux To MS Networking

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Fri, 2001-12-07 at 10:00, James.Rocks at equant.com wrote:
> Hi John (Mike, Sue),
>  
> Yugh! I don't like Star Office much, mainly because of the visible page
> borders and the fact that it fires up as a complete desktop where I'd
> rather use applications individually as and when I wish.

The beat of StarOffice 6 is supposedly much improved. It also gets rid
of the complete desktop thing.

> So K Office is pretty good huh? I tried AbiWord on windows (from Gnome
> office) but it doesn't support tables so is of limited use. Maybe the Linux
> version is more advanced than the Win version, I'm assuming they are
> equivalent at present.

Abiword is fairly minimalist. Good for letters (I use it), but not a
feature complete word processor.
 
> I would have thought ... I've checked out the Ximian website and I'm having
> some difficulty finding out exactly where the binaries are (duh!). I can't
> even find out id evolution supports "*.pst" files or can import from them
> (which would be nice as I can import my old mail then)

Get red-carpet, and upgrade with that. It can't import pst's directly,
but there are workarounds, so you can import your old mail with a bit of
work. If you want binaries, go to the Ximian site, and there are gnome
installation instructions. Look for the instructions for local media
install, or for making your own CD's - they'll take you to a link to the
actual packages.
 
> Sue:
> > I work in a mainly M$ environment, I have recently set up two Linux
> > servers, one file and one print.  These are running samba and are
> > member servers.  I picked up samba and the documentation from
> > the samba site http://www.samba.org/ I did have a little trouble
> > getting the boxes into the domain to start with but that was due to
> > problems with master browser elections.
> 
> That's my next task but I can't really try it until the weekend as I'm on
> the Christmas regime (shopping with the kids, babysitting etc.). I remember
> at my previous job that Samba was causing Master Browser election problems
> which was ultimately resolved by upgrading to the latest release of Samba.

It's pretty easy these days. The browser elections problems only happen if 
Samba is misconfigured. NT domain controllers don't expect to lose, and get 
all upset if they do. IMO this is actually an NT problem - it's trivially
easy to use as a denial of service attack
 
> Sue:
> > If you want any further info on samba, please give me a call.
> 
> If it's OK I wouldn't mind being able to direct e-mail rather than go
> through the group ... sometimes one gets better responses that way and less
> to trawl through if you know what I mean :-)

Feel free to chuck stuff in my direction also.

> Mike:
> > Samba will serve shares. To map them, you want smbfs, which you'll
> > need to compile into the kernel, or as a module. You can then
> > mount smb filesystems onto your machine. Samba comes with a bunch
> > of utilities, one of which (smbclient) can be used as a sort of ftp-
> > like program that speaks smb.
> 
> I tried this on SuSE at work under the advice of a colleague here (the only
> reason I don't use him heavily as Linux support is that he's from Belgium
> and has a heavy French accent making it difficult for me to understand him
> at times) and, despite being able to connect to the Internet (proving my
> NIC as functioning) I couldn't get Samba to function. I think I'll try at
> home :-)

It can be awkward. The smbfs support isn't as widely used as Samba is,
and isn't documented or supported as well as Samba. For mixed
environment file sharing, the best way to do it is to put the filestore
on a Linux machine. You can then share with NFS to other *nix boxes, and
Samba to windows, making your Samba setup either a domain controller or
a domain member as appropriate. In your case, that's probably further
than you want to go right now, but it is the best way to get it working
well IMO.
 
> > There's one other thing I'd like to ask (and I'm guessing no matter which
> > way I ask it some will take umbrage so I might as well go for it) ...
> > PLEASE if you plan to suggest something along the lines of getting rid of
> > NT/2K then don't ... I really would appreciate helpful advice not
> > evangelism :-)
> 
> Mike:
> > But evangelism's so much more *fun* :-).
> 
> Not! My hobbies are computing and debating religious fundamentalists both
> of which feature extremely evangelistic individuals ... trying to get a MAC
> enthusiast to admit that PC's AND MAC's are both good machines is like
> trying to get a theist to concede that atheism isn't immoral!

No, you just need to say they're both crap, and we should all use
SPARC's at the least, and act all superior :-)). Sadly, SPARC's are a
tad pricey (and it has to be said MacOS beats the crap out of CDE).
 
> Mike:
> > There's not a lot you can't do, it's the learning how that's tricky...
> 
> In other words RTFM ... groan ;-)

Yep - there's nothing better that TFM :-)

> Yes I'm serious ... I have a network at home and so look after all my
> wife's documents (and my older kids homework) which is valuable to them,
> all my own docs and a shed-load of MP3's and the thought of losing them
> gives me the screaming meamy's ... OK, not really but you get the gist.

I have similar stuff at home. My backups aren't nearly frequent enough,
but I do use software RAID heavily, and NFS mount a lot of stuff. I
don't have any Windows systems at home though, so I don't have to jump
through any hoops.
  
> You mean streaming like backing up multiple sources simultaneously? Like
> Legato does?

It will simultaneously dump one or more local or remote filesystems to
the holding disk. The writes to tape are serialized, and the tape is fed
with enough data to keep it operating at maximum throughput throughout.
 
> If I tell you my backup takes run to well over 70Gb (though only once a
> month) at present you'll probably see why I have a need :-)

Amanda will chew through 70Gb quite cheerfully :-).

> Yeah ... network bandwidth can be a problem during backups ... at present I
> am only using Win 2K backup (which is shyte but all I got) which grinds the
> server to a halt.

It's handy to be able to stop it from saturating the network. I've used
a number of commercial backup packages for several OS's, and can
honestly say that I'd take Amanda ahead of any or all of them. Nothing
else I've used does the job as well. Also, I like the fact that the only
Amanda specific thing it does to the backups is write a tape header. You
can, if necessary, do a bare metal recovery *without* *any* Amanda
software at all - a bootable floppy disk with a few utils and
tar/restore on it is enough. No commercial backup product I've ever used
offers that. I know of at least one person using it to back up
departmental systems at a University to a DLT library with two drives
and about 20 (I think) tape slots.

Mike.


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