[Nottingham] Setup on the main PC *nearly* worked.... couple of problems...

[Martin]

David Aldred wrote:
> Hello, all!
> 
> Peter & I installed Mandrake 10 on my 'main' machine last night - the 

Good (:-))


> one which (back under Windows) I'm typing on now.  This is the one with 

Why?!!!


[...]
> disconnected.  Dual boot the hard way - open the machine and reconnect 

lilo or grup dual boot is easy. This thing here is multiple boot with 8 
or so options in lilo and two always connected HDDs (and other stuff)...

(Doesn't get rebooted often enough to remember what they all are now (:-P))


[...]
> although the Linuxant site says that this will only run at 14.4k until 
> it's paid for and registered, it ran at 56k).  So far I haven't got as 

Rather interesting. I held off from installing their rpm because of the 
"2.4" kernel number and I'm on 2.6... What rpm is actually installed?

You can now get external 56k voice/fax/data modems for £10...


> far as testing the scanner, Palm and digicam connections, but I'm not 
> anticipating any issues.

For my scanner, I just had to copy across the USB scanner binary files 
for uploading and change one line in the conf file to select which 
binary to use. Very easy once you know (:-)).


[...]
> a ping across the internal network (192.168.0.x) won't work, which was 

Mandrake have all pings disabled by default. Go into MCC -> msec to 
enable ping echos. Then tweak shorewall for pings as you wish. Don't 
forget the "service shorewall restart" afterwards.

eg:
/etc/shorewall/rules

# Accept ping requests
ACCEPT:info all         fw              icmp    8



[...]
> Incidentally, the wireless network seems far more stable under Linux 
> than under Windows.  The roughly two-hourly unplugging and re-plugging 
> of the wireless dongle from the main machine to resurrect the connection 
> was no longer necessary!

What wireless card?


[...]
> - is there any (easy) way of setting up internet sharing without using 
> the "wizard" approach?

Yes. Let shorewall do it all for you from the config files in 
/etc/shorewall. Follow the howtos and examples in the very good docs.

You just identify the interfaces, and then specify how you want them to 
be available and/or masqueraded.

> - Can I have a firewall, internet sharing and internal pings all at 
> once, preferably with static IP addressing on the internal network (I 
> just prefer to know the numbers for each machine to help trace any 
> network issues)?

Yes. Very easy, even for the convoluted setups that I have! Sorry, it 
requires reading up on shorewall. About 30 mins should have you see the 
light (:-)).

Mandrake's DrakConnect is very good for home machines with one internet 
connection. It easily gets confused when there are multiple interfaces.


> Oh, and any recommendations for Linux virus checking?

Use amavisd to plug in whichever virus scanner you choose for email 
scanning.


> (Incidentally, I see that Windows latest 'security SP2 for XP' kills 
> Symantec anti-virus.  Nice to know things are all going as well as usual 
> at Gatesville :-)

No surprise. Likely various other things will be broken and refeatured...


Good luck,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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