HI everybody,
This may turn out to be a stupid question, but if you don’t ask you never know.

I have a home system with three laptops that had Ubuntu 18.04 on them and one desktop pc with windows 7. When I first ventured into the Linux world I had assistance from a technician who set up my home network for me. This enabled all of my machines to see my win 7 pc and all of my linux machines to see each other. I did have some limitations. For example he couldn’t get the win 7 machine to see the Ubuntu machines which really didn’t matter. It was serviceable for me.

Since then I have now changed all of laptops over to Zorin 15 which I will probably stick with. The question I have is….now don’t laugh….I am aware that the network configuration is contained in the fstab text file which I have located. Is it possible for me to use this and somehow have my existing Zorin machines see the configurations and restore my network?

I have become pretty savvy with Linux managing to install printers etc and all of my other things that I use, but networking is still a goal.

Is this a stupid question? Or is what I ask possible?

Thank you to anybody who may take time out of their day to reply.

There is much more to creating a network than /etc/fstab. The fstab can be used to mount existing network shares to a computer, but does not come into play in creating and configuring those shares.

Certainly you can network your Linux machines, but, before you do, it might be a good idea to do a web search for "configure linux network" and read some tutorials and HOWTOs to get the bigger picture.

The Arch Wiki would be a great place to start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._configuration

Thanks for the reply. Yes, that makes sense to me. In my home network I have a networked Media Tank that I transfer movies etc to. In fact this is the predominant use of my network. I have it so all of my machines can talk to the media tank and transfer things that I may download on any particular machine to it. The media tank has two hds in it which are clearly in the fstab. For the purposes of this exercise do I consider that these are already configured and therefor mountable via the fstab file in a simple way? This is what I was hoping was possible. I have had a number of changes as I said to operating systems and even the win 7 machine has had new hd since the one that was in the original configuration. If I can achieve a simple way to mount the media tank I think that I can then manage the new win 7 machine with its ip etc.

So is mounting the media tank hds possible without the need for re-configuring? I will have a read of the Arch guide to the best of my ability and thank you for the link. Being able to network things is high on my list of computer self-sufficiency so I continue to poke away at it. I am grateful for the guidance on the way. Thanks.