Fedora (RedHat) Question

[a-pluspc]

OK. I just moved and as I promised myself I am wiping Win2k off of my computers. I decided to go with the Fedora distribution. Maybe you guys can help me a bit with this.

Basically I am setting up a very simple network. I already have the DSL setup and I'm not running any public services from here. I have 1 box installed with the default 'server' packages and then I am going to install the rest (2 more Linux, leaving me with 1 Win2k and 1 WinXP Pro (Hey I got customers...)) with the default 'workstation' packages.

Right now I am unsure how to tell the workstations to logon via the server. I am only experienced doing this with Windows servers. I tried messing with the authentication applets but ended locking myself out and having to reload the first workstation.

[a-pluspc]

Ok so I did find out a few things yesterday between reloads and playing around. Use NIS to login and NFS to make /home directories available to users thus creating a "roaming" profile. I'm trying to figure out how to configure them now and will post an explanation when I do it. I hope someone else may be wanting to do this someday and can search this thread.

[fac3less]

just not sure what you mean by roaming profile.. as in have a third party system hosting the user accts and then being able to login to them on any machine?

or.. connecting from the outside..
(just not sure what you mean.. )

thought thats what ssh was for! :)

[a-pluspc]

No by roaming profile I mean that I want all the user account info (desktop, emails, personal files) to be kept on the server. I have several workstations (locally in my office) and am trying to congifure them so that I can login to anyone and, authenticating via the server, can login and access all of my personal data.

As of right now I've installed NIS on the server but am having DNS trouble. I don't know much about DNS so I'm reading up on it.

[a-pluspc]

Just to reitterate - all of the boxes are local... server and workstations.

[gaustin]

I use Samba(smb) to access files stored on a *nix box with a win machine. Samba is probably included in the Fedora distro...I'm not sure why you would need DNS(bind?). Are your machines behind something like a Linksys Broadband router?

[a-pluspc]

Originally posted by gaustin
I use Samba(smb) to access files stored on a *nix box with a win machine. Samba is probably included in the Fedora distro...I'm not sure why you would need DNS(bind?). Are your machines behind something like a Linksys Broadband router?

I am familiar with Samba but is it necessary when there aren't any windows boxes in the equation? At least right now I don't care to involve windows. The machines are accesing the net through the DSL gateway which is running DHCP. I'm an unable to even ping the other computers with their direct IP's

[gaustin]

Can all the boxes see the network the internet?

Even if all the machines are *nix then you still have to have some sort of server running to serve files. I have no clue about NFS.

Google groups and the relevent group faqs's has all of the answers you seek.

[a-pluspc]

All the boxes are able to see the internet no prob. NFS (Network File System?) is apparently the means used to share a mounted drive to the network.

[gaustin]

I looked at the man pages for nfs and nfsd.

In order to run an NFS server you have to compile support(nfsd.o) into your kernel if it's not already there.

I'm not sure what kind of client is used to mount a nfs filesystem on a windows box(on a linux box you add an entry to /etc/fstab).

I've only been suggesting Samba because it's default configuration would only have to be modified very slightly for your uses(half of to a dozen lines).

[gaustin]

you've probably seen this but I found a nice faq

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/

I'm looking around. Ya damn foo' got me curious.