Re: Lilo and Red Hat 6.1

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Ian Wright wrote:
> However, I now have the problem of trying to get this machine on my network
> and I haven't had any experience with getting two linux machines to talk to
> each other. I have just spent over two hours searching through the HOWTOs
> and I still don't understand a word of them!!!!!

Unfortuantely, I can't think (off the top of my head) of a Noddy
introduction to networking for linux - it's one of those sad things which
never gets touched. I designed (a while ago) a kind of plug'n'play
networking system for linux, so that I could plug any two machines
together and have themselves auto-configure, based around a couple of
programs which I could run on computers to 'attach' themselves. Maybe
oneday I'll clean them up and release them - they're not very nice, but
for simple networking like 90% of people use, it was great, I didn't have
to touch another config file again...

> At the moment I can ping my other two machines from the new linux box and I
> can smbmount the windows box onto it but I can't see this new linux box from
> either of my other machines. So, for a start, where have I gone wrong here?

Firstly, realise that there are a number of 'layers' to networking: ping
means that the basic transport mechanism, prolly. TCP/IP, is working.
Being able to ping doesn't confer being able to see the other computers,
etc., necessarily - these other things are all additional services running
on each computer and over the network.

> Second problem is that I don't know how to 'mount'? one linux machine onto
> the other. I found one command in one of the HOWTOs and tried it but it came
> back saying something about not being able to start RPC or something.  Can
> anyone offer a 'Janet and John' description of how to actually transfer
> files across a linux network or otherwise get the machines talking to one
> another. At the moment I think I would have more success getting an elephant
> to talk to a fish!! ;o(

It depends on exactly how you want to do things. For example, there's no
reason why you can't use a web browser. I have exactly this set up on one
of my networks, for a very good reason: it contains one linux box, one
Win98 box, one Mac G3, and possibly in the near future a '060 Amiga and a
Win 3.11 box. There are reasons for having this many different systems
(the linux box is the main server, the G3 is for video editing, the Win98
box is for script writing, etc.) and unfortuantely getting them to talk to
each other is a nightmare. However, I don't need roaming profiles, mounted
drives or anything like that: each machine has a designated 'public html'
directory, which is served by web server software. Web browser software is
then used to browse these directories, and transfer files. Of course,
there's nothing stopping you using / as your root html folder, as long as
you're not connected to an outside network. May seem a really odd way of
doing things, but a) people know how to use web browsers (and there is a
wide range of users on this system), and b) it's simple, and works ;))

Motto for the day: don't make life any more difficult than it needs to be,
and start simple ;)

Cheers,

Alex.

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