Re: Networking under SuSe

On 5 Maj, 12:29, houghi <hou...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
moheds...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I'm going to bee short so I don't get confusing. I'm just beginning to
learn Linux and I wanted to know how you guys went about when setting
up a network.

I installed openSUSE. Done.

I have three computers at home and wanted them to bond
in the classical Windows work group kind of way, shared folders and
stuff like that. I'm looking for some guidelines about the basic
principals on how to do this under Linux.

'kind of way' makes it sound as if all computers are going to be Linux,
so here goes short version: NFS.

Long version. NFS is what you best can use. NFS stands for Network File
System. Configuring this on each computer with YaST is easy. The
working behind it need some more information.

Linux does not know C: D: or anything like that. All it understands is
its directory tree, that is pretty good structured. Read `man hier`
about it. A must read for each new Linux user. I wish I would have read
it when I began with Linux. Would have saved much frustration.

See Linux only understands the directory structure, If you have just one
machine with the standard three partitions, this means the following
when you use it. You do not see the swap partition, so you can forget
about that part. You will have one root partition and one partitions for
your users. / and /home. As a hardware system administrator this is
important to know that you have two partitions. As a software system
administartor, it does not realy matter, because you won't realy see the
difference in the working of Linux wether you have just one / partition
or one / and one /home.

You can even have many more partitions, like a different one for /srv or
even subdirectories on a seperate partition like /var/spool/news or
/home/houghi/movies/porn

You can even have those partitions on different hard drives. e.g. a
10GB for / 250GB for /home and a raid of 8 750GB HDs for /media/porn

Now comes the fun part. The HD does not even need to be on the same
machine. You can, with NFS, easily mount any partition on any machine.
Say you have a machine 1, running openSUSE 10.1 and machine2, running
openSUSE 10.2 (I use dfifferent versions, to make it easier)

Your standard is to work on2, but you still want to access all the file
on 1. You just mount 1 on /media/1 and when you go to /media/1 you see
all the files. Most likely you just want to see a particular directory
on 1, so you mount /media/mp3 that is on the 1 as /media/mp3 on 2.

That way when you go to /media/mp3 on either machine, you will see the
identical same content.

It even gets better. You can not only mount some directories, you can
mount ALL directories. Why is this better? Glad youasked. You can mount
/home as well. Have a 10GB in each machine and one (the main computer)
have an additional server likehttp://tinyurl.com/2qudrqas /home for
your 30TB collection of, uh, nature movies. (OK, it will work with
smaller HD's as well)

That way on no matter what PC you log in, you will have the same
enviroment for each user on each machine.

A word of advice: if you run /home on a different machine, it still is
wise to have things like cache point to a directory (e.g. in /var) so
that does not run over the network. This can be easily done by
symlinking. And that can easily be done for each new user by editing
/etc/skel/*

(Damn, I realy would a rack, makes 5 of those servers)

And while we are on remote directories, you can obviously run this over
a VPN and have it anywhere in the world. Other things you can mount,
although not with NFS is e.g. your gmail 2+GB space.

houghi
--
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
the computer.

Well this stuff sound fantastic. A follow-up question is how do I make
the mount permanent, meaning that it will automount on startup without
the need of manually mounting everything. I'm under the impression
that a terminal mount resets after a reboot. Thx a million for the tip
thou.

.

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