[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu server edition

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:23:39 +0000
"Colin Humphrey" <c.humphrey_00 at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes, I was not looking to set up subnetworks and give out ip
> addresses with dhcp but to have an ubuntu machine act as a server to
> a windows machine.  I could not even have gotten that far becasue
> dhcp configuration failed and was thus skipped at installation.
> 
> I wanted the installation procedure to dynamically set up the
> networking addresses but as ethernet
> and dhcp both failed I was given the default loop back device, this
> was still no good as there was no ethernet detection.
> 
> So current situe is to get a machine which passes ethernet detection
> [good] and dhcp configuration[good but not essential]

OK, I'm a bit lost about what you're trying to do. To get IPs assigned
dynamically you have to have a DHCP server on the network to do this
(not actually true: there are ways of negotiating peer-to-peer for ad
hoc networks, but for simplicity I'll ignore that...). If the DHCP
step in the setting up networking is failing during boot up this is
probably because there either isn't a DHCP server on the network or
because the DHCP server isn't working properly (esp. if the same
symptoms are seen on a couple of different machines). 

When you say there was no ethernet detection do you mean that the
ethernet device wasn't detected or that it didn't detect the settings
for the network? You can tell this by running 'ifconfig' 

Something like:
|eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:16:CE:3B:6F:19  
|          inet addr:192.168.1.130  Bcast:192.168.1.255
|Mask:255.255.255.128
|          inet6 addr: fe80::216:ceff:fe3b:6f19/64 Scope:Link
|          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
|	   <snip>
means the interface is up and running, where as:
|eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0A:E4:FB:1A:3F  
|          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
|	   <snip>
means it is there but not configured.

If you don't have a DHCP server then you have to set the IP address
and DNS servers manually. The simplest test to see if your networking
hardware works would be 

ifup eth0 <IP address on the same subnet as the windows machine> 

and then ping the IP address you picked from the windows machine. That
would be enough for the windows machine to then access services on the
ubuntu machine and for the ubuntu machine to access things if you
specify the IP for them rather than the domain (add DNS servers to
resolv.conf to use names).

> Where can you get Xwindows from?  Also To run Xwindows would you have
> active desktop already installed?

XWindows is the system that draws graphical displays in Linux (xorg is
the flavour used in ubuntu). If you have a graphical display instead of
just a command line (white text on a black background) then you already
have XWindows installed. If you don't and you want it the easiest way
to get it is 
	sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
that fulls in some other things that you probably don't want on a
server though like openoffice. I can't find a meta-package to pull in
just the graphical utilities without the office and productivity stuff
etc. 
	sudo apt-get install gnome
Will get you a more minimal desktop but I'm not sure if it gets all the
network configuration tools etc.

If you have gnome installed (or after you install it) the network
configuration is System->Administration->Networking


________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam     rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

No sense being pessimistic: it wouldn't work anyway.