[Gllug] Linux To MS Networking

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2001-12-05 at 16:48, James.Rocks at equant.com wrote:
> I have just built a stable linux config (& resolved my mice problems) and
> need more help :-)
> 
> I currently run an NT (or rather Win2K) domain at home and would like some
> relatively easy to understand advice (bearing in mind I'm not yet
> particularly linux literate) on networking.
> 
> There are two parts to this.
> 
> Basic linux networking ... my Win2K server ios currently running as a DHCP
> server yet my Linux box is not picking up an address ... I could hard code
> an IP address in but would rather not.. Is there anything else I shoud be
> doing (on the server or the linux workstation) that can make this work. It
> works fine with MS clients (Win & DOS) so I assume the changes needed are
> on the linux box and, at present, I have no idea how to proceed.

You need to run a dhcp client on your machine.  most distros come with
one, and you should just need to make a config file change - others have
already made suggestions. What you get is distro-specific - dhclient or
pump are possibilities, though I'm sure there are others.
 
> Secondly how do I map read/write shares to my domain controller. Someone
> suggested Samba as a solution which I plan to investigate and I have found
> a couple of web-sites that offer utilities that do this ... haven't tried
> them yet.

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.
 
> 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 :-)

But evangelism's so much more *fun* :-).

 
> RTFM is a good idea 'tis true but I'm impatient and want to try using
> Linux "in anger" to see if it is possible to do all that I can do on
> Win2K with reasonable ease ... I suspect I can (& potentially more) 
> but it is going to
> take time to get oriented to it.

There's not a lot you can't do, it's the learning how that's tricky...

> Question: can linux handle DLT (40Gb) tape drives and, if so, can it >
> back up & restore data to an MS server across a network?

Yes. Most DLT drives are just SCSI tapes, and you can build SCSI tape
support into your kernel easily. You can then use tar or cpio to write
to the tape.

If you're serious about network backups, I'd suggest Amanda. To back up
and restore data to an MS machine, you'll want Amanda to run smbtar for
you, though you will have trouble getting coherent backups of the
registry (everything else should be fine). Many Amanda users find it
viable to make their NT boxes dual boot. I've heard of setups where the
NT machine has an rsh server on it, and the Linux box remotely shuts it
down, it reboots into a very minimal Linux setup, and Amanda then pulls
all the filesystems across the network onto tape.

Personally, I back up two Intel servers, one Intel workstation, and a
Solaris server nightly with Amanda, the Intel boxes to a 35Gb DLT drive,
and the Sun to a DDS3 drive. Amanda will operate your tape drive in
streaming mode - I regularly get 6Mb/s write to tape, and it produces
less wear on the tape heads. Amanda wants some disk space as a "holding
area", and if you forget to change the tapes, it'll back up to this
space, and you can change them next morning, and simply flush the
forgotten backup out. I've not seen any other system that does this.

To provide an idea on performance, here's an excerpt from my backup
report:-

DISK           L  ORIG-KB   OUT-KB COMP%  MMM:SS   KB/s  MMM:SS   KB/s
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
sda1           1      320      320   --     0:05   67.7    0:02  142.1
sda10          1      128      128   --     0:03   38.2    0:02   65.5
sda6           1       64       64   --     9:50    0.1    0:02   41.3
sda7           1      864      864   --     2:20    6.2    0:03  282.4
sda8           1    85536    85536   --     1:21 1060.4    0:33 2572.3
sda9           0  1175008  1175008   --    10:31 1863.5    3:53 5036.5
sdb1           0  1332512  1332512   --    11:19 1963.9    3:19 6698.6
sdb2           1    26944    26944   --     1:17  347.8    0:05 5152.7

So, it runs fairly fast :-). If you use software compression, it'll
calculate compression percentages for you - I'm using H/W compression in
this case. You can also throttle use of network bandwidth to prevent it
from hogging it all.

Mike.


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