Kathy, Having seen about 10 replies to this, I thought you needed at least one more! ;-)
There has been good coverage of the options in some of the other replies, so I'll just attempt to clarify what seemed to be a little confusing, or actually contradictory. 1. Yes, a 3rd machine would work well for this, but of course you can accomplish it with the two machines you already have. The desktop machine could become the server without limiting its use as a workstation. Then you don't even need a hub, just a crossover cable between the two machines. 2. How come no internet connection? You are obviously using one to talk to us. I guess this is a dialup from your laptop. As long as you are setting up a fileserver, why not make it a gateway, sharing an internet connection and acting as a firewall? 3. Some of the replies about Samba v NFS certainly confused me. Here's my take on it from experience of setting up my own identical LAN (well there are 4 machines, but otherwise identical). NFS makes it really simple to share with Linux clients. Samba makes is really simple to share with Windows clients. I just setup the directories I want to share as both NFS and Samba shares, so the win clients see them as win shares and the linux clients see them as NFS. Easy! 4. For me, it helps keep things easy and organized to limit shares to one direction. What I mean by this is that I access the server from the clients, but never share any directories on the clients. This also helps with backups. If all the important stuff is in one place, there's only one machine that needs data backed up (although you should probably also backup at least the /etc directory on all Linux machines). If you have enough disk space on your laptop, one reasonable strategy would be to backup to the server, then copy the backup to the laptop. That gives you some redundancy should either machine go up in flames. Anyway, have fun. Certainly no gurudom is required to set this up and it can greatly enhance the usablility and security of your systems. cheers Brian On Wed, 2002-02-20 at 08:33, Kathy Montgomery wrote: > I have a Windows 98/Mandrake regular computer and a Win 98/Mandrake > laptop. That's 4 separate filesystems on which to be confused about > where I have left my files. For that reason, I was thinking about > creating a little LAN (that would not need to be connected to the > Internet), and setting up a third machine as a file server. That way, > whatever OS/machine I'm on I could access the same files > (theoretically). > > Has anyone done this or does anyone have any tips on getting started? > Would I need any hardware besides a hub and Ethernet cards? Could I use > Samba to see the served files from Windows? Do I have to use NFS on the > server? Any recommended backup strategies? Could I find information > about this subject in any system administration book? > > Thanks, > Kathy > > -- > Unix fun: > > $ cat "food in can" > cat: cannot open food in can > > > > ---- > > Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? > Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
