[SWLUG] Wednesday

[justin at discordia.org.uk]

On 14 Apr, Rhys Sage wrote:
> I thought I'd better say what Linux has to contend with.
> I know I asked if anybody had a copy of Red Hat going spare but I forgot to 
> say what it had to run on (I don't want to end up with another version of
>  Linux that doesn't work, having been through Corel Linux and SME Linux 
> and having found neither worked). 
> The machine will cope with virtually anything. 
> The contentious bits are:
Unfortunately these are all generic components where the brand name
gives us no clue as to what the hardware really is, linux support for
hardware is primarily based on what chips are on a board, not on who
made it.

> 1. Ultra ATA/133 RAID Controller (Maplin/PC World)
This could be just about anything, you might be able to extract some
info from the hardware profile manager in windows, or from /sbin/lspci
under linux. or maybe someone else has experience of the depth of
support on cards like this.

> 2. Sitecom RJ45 Ethernet card (Maplin/PC World)
I think you already said this is an RTL8139 chipset card, which is fine.

> 3. Exair colour AGP card. (Maplin/PC World) 
You said you didnt want a monitor on it, so this is pretty much
irrelevant. you will always get text mode, and standard vesa graphics
modes regardless. exact card types only matter when you want 3d
acceleration or high performance 2d modes.

> The role of the machine will be:
> 1. File server.
File server to a windows machine ?
Then thats probably samba.
one alternative is to use WebDAV, a little trickier to setup on the
linux end, but the protocol is more secure than smb, is accessible over
the internet, and is still presented in the normal way to windows via
Web Folders.

> 2. Printer server.
again to windows ? Thats also samba.
an alternative is IPP (internet printing protocol) which is starting to
get support on windows and linux.

> 3. Maybe at some point a gateway. 
Easily achieved for just about ever scenario you can think of.
Just ask people when you know what your requirements are.

> The plan is to store all teh stuff on my PC on the server disks and keep
> the PC disks free (that'll give me extra speed on the PC) Eventually I'd
> like to run the new machine as a gateway and give it the firewall and
> anti-virus tasks. Rhys
There are a couple of commercial virus scanner programs available for
linux, they do nothing for linux of course, but you can use them to scan
your stored windows files. but this does very little to protect your
windows machine from you downloading (intentionally or otherwise) a
nasty program to your local windows C: drive. so its best to keep the
virus scanner there on the machine thats vulnerable.