small network

[Dave Andruczyk]

--- Advent Systems <adventsystems at verizon.net> wrote:

> Hello All & Happy Holidays,
>     I know this can get long and involved and I by no means want you 
> guys to do my homework for me, just let me know if I'm on the right 
> track.   I have (4) pc's and (1) laptop.  After spending 1-2 hrs. on the 
> Internet researching I ran my cable, plugged them in, loaded my firewall 
> software,  and clicking my mouse about 12 times at each box and my 
> network was up and running, including wireless access for my laptop!   
> In trying to get the boxes networked with Linux I',I've spent easily 100 
> hours "surfing" (I use different distros and everyone seems to approach 
> it and place network files and commands differently) I've purchased (3) 
> books ( $100+)  and after months I can now ping each machine!  
> Questions: 1.) Do I need or "should" I run the same distro on each box, 
> I know it sound stupid but hey! 

Nope,  you can run whatever distro you want,  but when learnig keeping them all
the same can sometimes make it easier, as not every distro configures the
intefaces the same way.

 2.) What do I "need" to share my files 
> amongst my boxes w/o unduly exposing them to the Internet, ie. NSF, NIS, 
> Samba,Firewall, etc. 

If you have a linux only network,  NFS is simplest, if you have a mixed
windows/linux then samba is probbaly the better route, as there isnt' a decent
FREE NFS client for windows that works worth a damn.

3.) Do I need to setup one box as a dedicated 
> server and the balance of the boxes as clients?

depends on what you want to do. If all the stuff that you want accessible by
the other machines is located on 1 box, then make that one hte serve,  if all
the machines have stuff that the others need to get to,  then they should all
be setup to serve. (think it out,  sometimes sketching it out on a paper ahead
of time helps, and consistently implementing it across the machiens makes it
easier to troubleshoot and manage later..)

> Again I don't need a step by step here.  I'm willing to put in the time 
> It's just that its getting ridiculous and want to make sure I'm going in 
> the right direction.  To Illustrate how bad it is I have NO boxes 
> running Linux at  all right now  ( my boxes are all duel boot w/win2k) 
> because  of my file sharing requirements.


=====
Dave J. Andruczyk


		
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