Greetings, Rather than start a new thread, I thought Id tag along here.
First, I want to thank Michael Herger and other generous souls for sharing their work and knowledge. I am perpetually amazed by how easily we can learn so much from each other thanks to this medium. Gildahls post about FreeNAS resonated with me very much, as I am in nearly the same situation but have not yet caught up relative to Linux competency. I shall never catch up to most of you in overall technical expertise, and Im okay with that. We all have our gifts. I am also aware of and interested in Robin Bowes' ongoing relevant work. I am a business analyst by trade, not a technician. So, please speak slowly and sequentially :) Sorry for the long initial post, and sincere thanks in advance for anybody who has the time and inclination to suffer and help dispel my ignorance. I am having trouble understanding and implementing DSL and appropriate disk partitions and formats for my situation. I have tried to read FAQs and use the search both here and at DSLforums, but I have reached a point where I would feel better with some job-specific analysis. Here is what I want to do: - Have an NAS-type device that will be accessible for read/write operations from Windows XP machines on my home network (digital photos and music, shared and backed-up document storage). - Use that same device as a Slimserver. I will use Squeezesoft as the client at least initially. - Have that machine operate headlessly. - Have a backup plan. - Maybe be able to use it as a print server. - Not spend the rest of my summer learning Linux from scratch. Have easy management on an ongoing basis. - Bask in the glory of convergence. - Have my wife understand and appreciate why I spend time on this stuff (deliver content and an intelligible network environment to her and other household end users). Heres what I have to work with: - An old Dell 733Mhz PIII, 128MB RAM, with the original 30GB IDE Drive and a new WD 250GB IDE Drive (Primary Master and Primary Slave, respectively). IDE CD-ROM as Secondary Master. Machine has a network card connected via Cat5e to Linksys WRT54G (new, nonhackable version) which distributes the DSL connection to four other clients (2 wireless, 2 wired, all XP home SP2). The BIOS boots from CD but not from USB. The machine HAS USB ports, but I cant seem to make it boot from them. Id be open to leaving a pendrive in the machine and booting from CD as necessary if that helps me. - I am not deeply concerned about security and privileges, since I do not plan to expose this machine outside my home network. - Im patient. Im a good learner. I know when to relax and have a beer. Heres what Ive done (like you ask you kids what did you do?!): - Installed the new drive. - Installed FreeNAS - Successfully mapped both the network drives to other client machines. Read, wrote, headlessly managed. Took a deep breath. - Discovered and became obsessed with what Slimserver could mean to me relative to synchronized, whole-house audio. - Realized how damn little I know about computer innards and Linux. - Discovered SlimCD. Briefly rejoiced. - Burned SlimCD. Successfully booted machine using SlimCD. DSL seems to see the network card. Problems: - Once booted on SlimCD, the machine is virtually non-responsive. It will barely (after a LONG wait) bring up the Firefox getting started document. Trying to do much of anything else seems to just hang the system. I cant use the GUI for much of anything. - I suspect my RAM is inadequate, and very strongly suspect that DSL is not recognizing either hda or hdb. - I dont know diddley-squat about DSL, Linux, Grub, Lilo, Samba, etc. Heres what Im thinking I need to do (and where I need help): - Id like to not have to spend money upgrading the RAM. Im not even sure if Id be able to find the right modules, and Ill bet they would not be a good value. My hope is that DSL is small enough to run on existing resources. - Boot the server to dsl level 2 - sudo su - emelfm. Look around. Get confused. - Use cfdisk to mount and make partitions for boot, swap, backup, etc. on a pendrive. - Leave both the hard disks as read-only NTFS. Put content there using XP. The only time the server should need to read those resources is to stream audio using slimserver. - Proceed with a Frugal install to the pendrive. - Enable SSH at startup - Use tools from nomachine for the headless management Questions: I dont understand how to format, partition, mount, etc. the drives so that they can be used by both DSL and the XP clients. I understand that Linux can only read NTFS, but I cant even get it to mount the drive through the SlimCD interface. Id be okay with having the 30GB disk devoted entirely to Linux if that helps, but it seems like a lot of wasted space. Despite my best efforts at composing a coherent question, I cant. Will this scenario work? Is it best in my situation? Will I still be able to manage the content on the disks from XP as mapped network drives? How big a pendrive do I need? If I buy an external USB HD for backing up, how do I manage that? What sort of provisions do I need to make regarding usernames and passwords and how do I do that? Does anybody care to give me step-by-step of what I should do next? Im more grateful for communities like these with each passing day. Have a good beer. -- tomtuttle ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tomtuttle's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6393 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25148 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
