[Nottingham] home networking

David Wolfson eaxdrw at nottingham.ac.uk
Thu Dec 9 10:29:43 GMT 2004


Last night I tried to setup samba on our mini home network, and didn't quiet get there. The instalation and setup seemed to go ok, and I could browse the samba shares on the locally on the machine that is to be the server. I could see, but not access them from a windows machine, and could not get to them from another linux box.  I think what I have done is open a whole can of worms, that might need to be delt with one at a time! First off, I ought to give a little more information...

The network is 4-5 machines sharing a tiscali broadband connection.  We have a modem/router/wireless access point (all one linksys box), which has the samba-server-to-be on an ehternet connection, and all other machines conencted on wi-fi. The router is setup to hand out IP addresses with DHCP. All the machines can connect to the internet (when BT don't cut the connection off), and other than the fact that it'd be good to share a printer and some files all seems to be good. The problem comes with the two linux machines that I have setup.  Both are dual boot with xp and RH9 (I fear this has been done badly, but works), and can access the internet fine. However, neither of them as a host ID, thinking that they are 'localhost.localdomain'. This isn't going to be much use when trying to connect across a network!

I found my way to a site on setting up compaq servers on linux (?) and followed their setting up the hostname advice here:
http://www.cpqlinux.com/hostname.html 
(in summary changes and check to /etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig/network, /proc/sys/kernel/hostname, /etc/ sysconfig/network-scripts...)

This seemed to work, and log in and out of gnome happily (unlike my previous butchering of /etc/hosts) but the changes don't seem to survive a reboot. Also, this didn't seem to seem to solve the samba problem (the error was something along the lines of 'couldn't connect to the host. hostname "null"...). I looked at the smaba.org checklist:
http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/diagnosis.html 

and found that I couldn't ping the various machines by name, as suggested in section 33.1. I tried pinging by IP, and that works ok, but giving the IP as the smaba hostname doesn't work. (NB: the whole lot is behind a firewall on the router, so there are no firewalls on individual machines.)

I think what I all this is pointing to is poorly setup network, that does ok sharing an internet connection, but not much more. I am biting off a whole host of trouble, or does this sound fixable? Although I'm open to better ideas, the first thing I think it'd be good to fix is giving these machines working hostnames.  Any clues on how to get these to survive a reboot? Also, I've just been giving hostnames with no domainname.  Is this something I can just make up and add on, or is there more to it? Might it even help?

Sorry for the long mail, but it seemed worth giving as much info as possible.  Feel free to ask for any more info (or tell me that it's more trouble than it's worth to share a printer!).

Thanks in advance,

Dave



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