[Sderby] Networking in Linux

[Paul Grosse]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andre Hefer" <andre.hefer at avhservices.co.uk>
To: <david.coulson6 at btopenworld.com>; "South Derby LUG General Mailing List"
<sderby at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 6:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Sderby] Networking in Linux


> On Friday 10 September 2004 16:44, Dave Coulson wrote:
> > Hi chaps
> > Some advice needed please!
> > I have my computer on a local network to my wife's machine, running
> > through a Netgear DG814 Router and two ethernet cards. I also have a
> > second hard disk on my machine from which I run Linux, booted from a
> > floppy. I wish to be able to see my wife's machine from Linux but am not
> > sure how to set things up.
>
> Dave
>
> I run Samba from a linux box, so have some experience of this. SAMBA is a
file
> and print server that runs under linux and emulates the SMB (Short Message
> Block)  which is the protocol Microsoft used up to Windows NT. Later
versions
> of Windows also support it for backward compatibility.
>
> When you have Samba running your wife will be able to "see" any
directories to
> which she has been given access. The best thing is to do map a Samba
> directory as say the G:\ drive on her machine.
>
> Basic Samba Administration can be done via YAST but its a lot better using
> SWAT (Samba Webmin Administration Tool) via Webmin.
>
> I have not used the facilities included under SuSE 9.1 to map Windows
drives
> from Konqueror because I would rather have my files on something secure
and
> stable i.e not M$.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> Andre

If you want to see your wife's machine, you need the samba client running on
the Linux box. If you want shares on your Linux box to appear on your wife's
machine, you need to get the Samba Server running on Linux as well. To do
that you need to run not only smb but also nmb or her machine will not be
able to see the name of your machine.

Getting samba to run is possibly easiest done using YaST2 and making sure
that it runs at the right run levels (I kick it into action at run level 3
and 5 but that machine only ever boots up every few months when lightning
takes the power out (82 days last time -- its on 22 at the moment)).

Geting samba shares to appear on the Windows box is easy because all you
have to do is edit /etc/samba/smb.conf, putting the share name in square
brackets and adding a few lines below it. If your inner network is
reasonably well secured you might as well run read and write access on
shares (where appropriate) as it makes everything easy to use. If you have a
Windows machine running, it will be like this already.

There was a bit about this in HelpDesk Extra on the SuperDisc 217 (which was
basically how to set up an all purpose machine, or at least how to set up
the components so that you could run a firewall separately from the server).

Paul Grosse