Baslinux mailing list

[Matrix Mole <matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, James Miller wrote:

> Sounds like an interesting - and challenging - project.  Please keep us
> posted on your progress: I'd like to know how to do this too.  Just as a
> clarification: BL will serve, at one and the same time, as a user's
> machine *and* a fileserver?  Or will it just sit there and serve files,
> while all the user computing will go on on the Mac and Win machines?  I do
> think user accounts are required by samba, but my knowledge of that is
> pretty sketchy.  I haven't managed to get real far with samba in my Linux
> computing career thus far.

I agree, it is a very challenging project. Basically what I'm going to do,
is set BL up as a server machine and run it headless, most of my
maintenance I'll be doing through telnet sessions. I guess fileserver is
the wrong word to describe what I'm after. The linux box isn't going to
simply be a fileserver. It's going to be the primary server in the home
network. It will include print server, mail server, and other functions
I'm sure that I can't think of right now. Essentially, it's just going to
be a "toy" for me to play with. This helps answer a question that Robert
brought up (why not use the Slackware install instead of BL). The machine
I'm using as my Linux box is a Celeron300, with 64MB ram, and roughly
3.75GB of harddrive space spread over two seperate drives. I could just
install the slackware7.1 package, but then I wouldn't know half of what
all was on the system being used. With BL, I have a lot more control over
what packages are installed and can actually learn what the packages do
this way. Instead of having a bunch of packages I'll never know the
existance of, or need installed. And of course, there's the desire to do
this the hard way through a long line of installpkg uses. I'm an old
school computer enthusiast. I like doing installs in such a way that I
learn as well as have complete control. I've seen it described as a very
masochist approach to computeing, but I find it enjoyable nonetheless.
Anything that'll help me learn more :)

The addition of my wifes's Mac into the connection is to allow her access
to the internet through the network.  This will be a fun feat to perform.
Right now, I'm using a standard dial-up using Netzero to access the net on
my Win98 box. once budget allows I intend to get a cablemodem, and
install some firewall software on my BL box too. Then, I'll have the
cablemodem conected to the linux machine, and all the machines will access
the net through the linux box. Even before I get cablemodem, I want to be
able to give my wife access to the net. This I know is a win98 modemshare
issue, and since this isn't a Windows forum I'll drop that for now :)

I went over everything last night, and got the harddrive install setup
properly. I left a 4MB partition as hda1 that I have as a bootable section
and can then load directly into BL (I'm thinking of having an autoexec
that simply calls boot.bat, but will wait for now). I probably could have
gotten away with only using a 2MB partition or even smaller, but I don't
mind the loss of 4MB for a root Win98 Dos system. I got all the man
packages installed that I can think off with the exception of
manpages.tgz. Is this package neccessary to install? I saw that there were
man pages for the utilities already included.

As for samba, I can't say anything about until I have the hardware to
start connecting the machines together. Once I have that I'll post some of
my results here.

> On books: I tried looking over some books and webpages but I never found
> anything that was really helpful (I did not search exhaustively, btw).
> They probably helped a little, but what really finally got my home network
> up and running was asking questions of other Linux users (e.g., BL's
> Steven) who knew networking principles much better than me.  If you do
> find that one crucial resource in book/webpage form, please do let us
> know.  I'd like to consult it as well.  I wish I could donate you some
> cabling: my wife's workplace updated their network recently and threw a
> bunch of cat 5 cabling in the garbage which I, of course, dutifully
> retrieved.  It's a whole lot more than I'll ever use - alot of it with
> only one crimped end.  Probably would cost as much for me to ship you some
> as it would to buy new, though :(
>
> Keep us posted, James

That's what I was afraid of. I wish I could find some computer user groups
in my area to sponge knowledge from :)  As for the cableing, I'm not too
worried about that. My wife works at goodwill (that's where I've gotten
some of the computer hardware from to begin with). I'm pretty good friends
with the manager, who is a fellow computer enthusiast. I've asked him to
keep an eye out for cables and hubs for me. Going that route, I'm fairly
sure that I'll get the cables for the same if not lower than it'd cost you
to ship them (unless you lived in Arizona). So no worries there. That was
a great benifit to you though to get them the way you did.

matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org