Home network for 6 Linux terminals and no broadband connections
 

Here is what we want to do. We have 6 terminals in our home with Kubuntu, Suse 10 Pro, and Mandrive 2008. I have the house wired for 10/100/1000 with a switch.

Since Broadband is not available, Three of the terminals have external hardware modems for internet connection.

My first priority would be to be able to transfer files from one terminal to another.

Second priority would be to put a jet port / printer on the switch for frinting from all the terminals.

My third wish would be to use one terminal to access internet via damned slow dialup, and pull all of the different user accounts to one machine (PC Server) and distributed from there. This is not a priority

Since Windows is not an issue, I don't see a need for Samba. Since broadband is not available, there doesn't appear to be a need for a router. What I do neet to keep seperate is the network configurations of KPPP / PPP from my internal network.

Using a router will simplify things (addresses) quite a bit. Then just use nfs to transfer files.

Teaming the modems (phone) will be a whole other ball of wax. In MOST case the connection to any one thing will not be sped up.

Since you already have a switch, and can't get broadband, the only thing a router would do for you is provide DHCP to automatically assign IP addresses to the PCs. But the router would not be the default route, since the modem will be connected to one PC, so it would actually be a little tricky to setup.

Before I got broadband a few years ago, I actually did what you are trying to do.

Have you assigned IP addresses? There are various zeroconf schemes to take care of assigning IP addresses automatically, such as the very popular avahi. But my preference is to just manually assign IP address to each machine and manually update /etc/hosts, which I then copy to each machine. Changes are rare for me, so this is not a burden.

You can setup each machine as an nfs server, mount each machine's disk on the others and freely copy files back and forth with no effort.

When you setup a printer on any machine, you can make it sharable so the others can find it and print to it. I think there is a checkbox for this if you set it up with cups via a browser.

Allowing the other PCs to access the internet through one PC's modem requires two steps:

• On the PC with the modem, enable forwarding in /etc/sysctl.conf, and
• On the other PCs, specify the PC with the modem as the default route or gateway (e.g. in /etc/sysconfig/network).

First you can do all of this, setup the machine you want to use for dialup as a router, run DNS, and DHCP on this. This will firstly allow you to use this as a gateway for all the other systems, it will also allow you to simplify the management of the other computers as they can pull all the IP info from the DHCP server, set the DNS server to be authoritative on your internal network and a caching server for all other requests.

Next setup user accounts for all the people that access your computers on the gateway/router, you can use a shell script to login to the gateway and use each individual username to logon with the modem (is this a neccesity, or could you use one dialup account, it would simplify things, when someone requests an internet thing then the router would dial on demand to that one user-dialup account)

As for printing are you talking about using a networked printer, if you are then you just need to plug it into the switch and then setup a cups printer on each system for that type of printer with the printer IP address as the printer queue, otherwise use cups to share the printer from whatever system you have the printer attached to.

And as said you can use nfs to transfer files from one machine to another.

Good luck

Then I think I'm on the right path - -
 

I have put static IP's on all the terminals. Can ping most of them. I hadn't considered the etc/host/ file as I was looking at that as the outside connection info to the ISP. I also hadn't considered the possibility of needing to create user accounts across terminals, and making each terminal an NFS Server, but that does make sense.

I like the idea of using one terminal as a router - - I'll have to look at that some more.

I'm not looking to gang the modems together. (I have two phone lines into the house, but use only one for internet) My damned slow dialup wouldn't make that a worthwhile possibility although I might get up to the proverbial 53Kps by doing so. We are happy we have seen an increase from 21.6 to 28.8 recently (people getting away from copper lines)

I should have a better idea after playing with these teminals this weekend.