[Sussex] Setting up a simple home network

[Captain Redbeard]

Greetings,

OK, so I got the switch and the proper cables, and I've 
plugged my two Slackware 10.1 boxes into it - now what. 
I've been trying to get the two machines to talk to each 
other but so far failing miserably, why?  Here's what I've 
done so far:

I have currently two machines on the network (but once it's 
up and running I plan to add two or three more), the faster 
one which will eventually be the server is called 
templeofthebeard while the slower one is called 
shrineofthebeard.  The network itself, for want of a better 
term, is called homenet.  Neither of these is yet connected 
to the Internet so until I get them going my connection is 
via <cringe> an Win XP laptop </cringe>.  I've created a 
directory called /home/public on templeofthebeard (the 
server) which had global read and write privileges which I 
want shrineofthebeard (the client) to be able to access. 
The /etc/hosts on both machines looks like this (minus 
commented lines):


127.0.0.1           localhost

192.168.0.1    shrineofthebeard.homenet shrineofthebeard
192.168.0.2    shrineofthebeard.homenet shrineofthebeard


I've run "netconfig" on both machines and given them the 
data listed above and also told it that there are both 
connected via static IP, the netmask is 255.255.255.0 
(though I have no idea what this actually means) have no 
gateway address, and are not using a nameserver.  Then I ran 
  "ifconfig" on both machines.  The client reported this for 
eth0:


Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:60:6E:36:DE:94
inet addr:127.0.0.11  BCast:127.0.0.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:10  Base address:0xda00

As well as an entry for lo.  Note that the inet 
addr:127.0.0.11 comes from an earlier attempt to get the 
machines configured when I tried to call them 127.0.0.10 and 
127.0.0.11 before discovering that they should be numbered 
192.168....  On the server the output is very similar except 
that the line starting "inet addr:" is missing and TX bytes 
is given the figure of 1180.  Does this mean anything in 
particular?  Other than that this seems to mean that the 
hardware is running and configured and as all the relevant 
lights show up on the switch I *assume* this means that the 
hardware is configured correctly.  Now what?

Up to now my main info source has been "The Official Guide 
To Slackware Linux" at http://www.slackware.com/book/.  Any 
other books and HOW-TO's I found were all either 
distro-specific or assumed I was connecting my computer to 
the Internet, which I will be but not yet.  So now we're up 
to the section "The /etc files" in chapter 5.  I changed 
/etc/hosts as listed above /etc/inetd.conf, 
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 didn't seem like 
they needed any configuration so I left them as the default 
while /etc/resolv.conf now looks like this on both machines:


search homenet
domain homenet


So the next chapter told me I needed to have the services 
portmap, nfsd, and mountd running on the server.  I tried 
"ps -A" and did not find any such entries and typing the 
names directly into bash gave me a "command not found" 
error.  So after a brief search with the locate command I 
found and ran rpc.portmap, rpc.nfsd and rpc.mountd so they 
do now appear in the list when i type "ps -A".  I'm 
*assuming* that these are the equivalent files.  Next I 
added the following line /etc/exports:


/home/public


which is the directory with global read/write privileges on 
the server.  At this point in the manual the mount command 
is used, so presumably everything should be configured 
correctly and fully set-up.  Granted, most of what I've done 
so far is "paint-by-numbers" style without really 
understanding what I'm doing with some "I hope this works" 
guesses thrown in for good measure.  Let's see how far I 
get.  I then created a directory /home/public on the client 
machine and typed "mount -t 
templeofthebeard.homenet:/home/public /home/public".  The 
result:


mount: can't get address for templeofthebeard.homenet


And this is where I've been stuck since.  Note that I've 
been through this whole sequence several times and have done 
numerous searches through websites and various books to find 
ut what's wrong but most of the time they assume that your 
trying to set your computer up as a gateway or web-server 
and the "Home-Network-mini-HOWTO" is Red Hat specific - I 
got as far as being told to edit the file 
/etc/sysconfig/network, found there was no such directory on 
my machines and stopped right there.  I also tried "ping 
192.168.0.1" and "ping 192.168.0.2" on both machines and got 
"connect: Network is unreachable", this is as far as I got 
on the "Newbie's Guide to Small Home LAN" from 
LinuxQuestions.org.  Help, I've run out of ideas.  Sorry if 
this posting is a bit long but I wanted to be sure I 
included all the relevant data and I don't know enough about 
networks to tell what's relevant and what isn't.  So please, 
apart from being a clueless idiot, what am I doing wrong?



Captain Redbeard



===========================================================
  The MS Staff

There was a pilot flying a small single engine charter 
plane, with a couple of very important executives on board. 
He was coming into Seattle airport through thick fog with 
less than 10m visibility when his instruments went out. So 
he began circling around looking for landmark. After an hour 
or so, he starts running pretty low on fuel and the 
passengers are getting very nervous. Finally, a small 
opening in the fog appears and he sees a tall building with 
one guy working alone on the fifth floor. The pilot banks 
the plane around, rolls down the window and shouts to the 
guy "Hey! Where am I?" To this, the solitary office worker 
replies "You're in a plane." The pilot rolls up the window, 
executes a 180 degree turn and proceeds to execute a perfect 
blind landing on the runway of the airport 5 miles away. 
Just as the plane stops, so does the engine as the fuel has 
run out.

The passengers are amazed and one asks how he did it. 
"Simple" replies the pilot, "I asked the guy in that 
building a simple question. The answer he gave me was 100 
percent correct but absolutely useless, therefore that must 
be Microsoft's support office and from there the airport is 
just a while away."
===========================================================