how do you network two Ubuntu computers with a crossover cable?

[Sarangan Thuraisingham / துரைசிங்கம் சாரங்கன்]

Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Dec 2005 22:12:04 +0000
> Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>The question now is, how do you do anything more than just ping? I have set
>>each of the computers to share the users home directory with NFS, but all I
>>get when I open up Places->Networks is that it asks me for a whole bunch of
>>passwords in succession before finally leaving me with the usual empty
>>Windows network.
> 
> 
> For setting up NFS I found this howto useful:
> 
> http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/NFS-HOWTO/
> 
> NFS mounts won't appear under Places-Network ( I find this unintuitive,
> too) They will appear in Places - Computer, and an icon will appear under
> Computer in the Places menu when they are mounted. You will also get
> an icon on the Gnome desktop when the share is mounted. You can mount from
> the Computer"place", and unmount from a right click on the icon, or from
> the Computer place in Nautilus.
> 
> I can't help  with Samba, as I've only played with it,, and decided NFS
> was better for my needs on a simple small network with only Linux
> machines.
> 
> Peter
> 

For Samba, if it asks you for your username and password when you 
haven't set any, then you can provide an empty username and password. 
Its a bit annoying that it repeatedly asks for a username and password 
every time you open a folder or file. I haven't found a solution to this 
yet. For the anonymous logins to work, the share should have 'guest ok = 
yes' in the smb.conf.
So I have shared my USB hard disk like this in /etc/samba/smb.conf:
  [USB_Video]
    comment = Video Folder on USBHD
    path = /media/USB_HD/Video
    guest ok = yes
    writable =yes
    browseable = yes

If you want to enforce logins, just comment out the 'guest ok' line and 
add a user using smbpasswd. Something like this, in a root terminal, to 
set the password for user 'sean':
    smbpasswd -U sean

or if you are logged in as 'sean' in a terminal, then 'smbpasswd' should 
suffice.

-- 
Regards,
  - Saru
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Sarangan Thuraisingham
ECS, University of Southampton, UK

Homepage: http://sarangan.thuraisingham.net

    Tux is the Best
   Next is the Rest
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