Hey guys,

OK, a quick background - I've been using a Linux server for a minecraft server for the past 18 months. I had root the entire time, done plenty of playing around with it and know my way around the basics. The server was rented through a company, so they had done all the installation and setup.

Today, I decided I wanted to make a local version of the server. I installed CentOS just fine onto an old PC I had lying around (When I say old, its a quadcore so specs are fine)
...This is where I got stuck.

If I plug a screen directly into the machine, I get the terminal just fine as I'd expect. However, I want to control it via PuTTY from a Windows machine. I've searched for the past 2-3 hours, and just can't get my head around it. I've got Samba installed, and as far as I'm aware it is set up, but when I try and connect with PuTTY on the windows machine I get "Unable to open connection to server.name - Host does not exist"

It's probably just a very stupid, newbie mistake... but thats why this is in the newbie section I guess! Note the computer I'm currently trying to use to control it is on the same network, but I will need to be able to do it outside the network too once this is all working.

Thanks

putty has nothing to do with samba at all.

so you need to...

1) make sure you can ping the server
2) you have the sshd service running on the server
3) your firewall is permitting access on port tcp 22 to the service.

after that, there's really nothing else and this shoudl all work by default.

But now I see a "host does not exist" message in your reply none of that above actually matters. You have a DNS issue. Windows doesn't magically know your machines hostname. Just use the IP. Job done.

As I said, probably a newbie mistake! Will try that.

As for the samba thing, various articles around the web mentioned it. For example this talks about Samba in the introduction then explains logging in with PuTTY, so I assumed both were needed.

EDIT: 15 seconds later and I'm connected just fine. Doh!
How would I connect from somewhere outside my network though? I just used the 192.168.x.x IP, As far as I'm aware my actual IP address is for my internet connection and not a specific machine, so how would I tell it what machine to connect to... if that makes sense? :P

you would use port forwarding. great guides for most any home router at portforward.com