[Nottingham] Network neophyte

[Graeme Fowler]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Michael Leuty wrote:
> My question is - how simple would it be to set up networking? We don't 
> want anything grand, just some shared directories and possibly also 
> printer sharing. Will it all just work "out of the box" with each PC 
> picking up its IP address from the DHCP server in the ADSL box. Or 
> would I need to do a lot of tweaking (which would probably be beyond 
> me)?

Well... I'm not really a big desktop user, to be honest (carried the same FVWM
setup for about four years before moving to GNOME), however:

I recently installed a new machine at home, destined to be my cable (or DSL) 
gateway. I beheaded my old server and parked it in a cupboard where it quietly 
gets on with running DHCP, DNS, proxy, Samba and a host of other services for 
my home network.

I then installed FC2 on the new machine. Imagine my surprise when it found the 
local Samba domain, NFS servers, printers and all right out of the box. I had 
to do a small amount of password settings and so on, but very little "under 
the hood" tweakage apart from to get the video (a Matrox G550 dual head) to 
run properly. That apart, it felt very slick - not really something I'm used 
to, as I've been a dyed-in-the-wool RedHat person for a long time. I got very 
fond of that clunky old curses-based installer :)

>From the moment of installation right through to now it's just Got On With 
Things. I quite like it!

Graeme