well, there aren't many feather fans out there judging by the number of threads in this section!

do people go for dsl instead for some reason?

anyway, I have an external usb hdd that feather doesn't seem to pick up. Also, I have, well, I wouldn't exactly call it a network, but it is connected via crossover cable to an xp machine, I want to cram the hdd of feather with files from the external hdd.

my question is this, which would be easier? getting the external hdd to mount, or setting up networking between xp and feather?

has anyone had experience of either?

Which is easier all depends on your experience. With that said, if you are editing config files, it doesn't matter too much what the distro is you are using. I do use DSL, never had a need to try something like Feather.

On the HD, if you open a konsole, and run 'lsusb' can you see the drive? If yes, and it is formatted, then making a mount point with 'mkdir' and adding a mount command to /etc/fstab should get the drive connected. I'm assuming you have a linux supported file system on the drive. If it is NTFS you need a driver loaded on some distros. You would need to look into NTFS support on Feather.

As for the network connection, if all you ned tis linux to win connection, then set up static IP addresses on both sides on the same sub-net. ie 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 and a mask of 255.255.255.0. Edit your hosts file on both sides, and add entries for the other side. Set a default route to the other machine.

If you want internet access from linux through win, it can be set up in XP to do that. Never done it myself. See what you can find with google. Linux can also be the box connected to the internet. ( Never done that one either, but I know it will work ). Easy way is to buy a router.

Once you have a router you set up the router, connect what ever to it, and everything is online, and interconnected...

I'll probably do both in the long run anyway, thanks for the advice.

My experience level is pretty low, but I've looked into fstab before, so that may be the quickest way for me as it's formatted to fat32 and I have experience of having that working for both sides, although I must have got something wrong because I couldn't write to it from linux! But that worked out ok when I found yareg to bring files in from the windows end that won't be happening this time though, but that's ok, it should be a one way trip for these files

thanks for the thoughts cliff, it's much appreciated

You should be able to write from the linux side, as long as the partition is not mounted as 'ro'. Here is what my fstab entries for my fat32 partitions look like.

If your system defaults is 'ro' try entering 'rw' as an oprion, no quotes.

got the external drive working(at least for getting files off the external drive, I haven't tried sending from the feather box just yet), thanks for the help, next on the list is this bit I guess...

It's unlikely that I'll put this machine online, so I needn't bother with that just yet.

Could I get you to elaborate a little on how to set these ip addresses? As I think I mentioned, I'm a bit of a networking noob...

Sure, the first thing to determine is if you have a driver loaded for your nic. I'm going to describe most things from a command line point of view. I have not used Feather linux, it may have gui tools to do a lot of this stuff. If it does, then using them is probably the easier way. What I describe should work on any linux system.

For the driver, open a bash screen ( bourne again shell ) and run the command '/sbin/ifconfig ' ( without the quotes ). If you have a driver loaded and the nic is there, you will see something like this -

The left column is the name linux knows the hardware resource by; eth0 on my system is the network interface. lo is known as the loopback interface. Note the second line on eth0, I have an inet addr. This is my IP address. If you see this for your system, you are miles ahead. If you don't get anything at this point, or no IP address, we may need to load a driver, or just define an IP addr for the interface.

If you get nothing, run the command 'lsmod' and post the results. lsmod shows loaded kernel modules that work with your hardware. Have a look through the list to see if you can see a driver for your nic. If not, then post the output of lsmod and as much information as you can about your nic. Make, model and if you know it chip set.

Go that far, let me know...

hmmm ifconfig gave only lo information, so I tried ifconfig -a, lo and behold....

lsmod gave...

this is the same type of card, as for chipset, I believe it to be RTL8139, but unfortunately, this is my only evidence... :S

Good stuff so far. It appears you do have a driver loaded for eth0. 1839too is the driver.

The reason /sbin/ifconfig did not show anything and ifconfig -a does; the first without the -a switch shows only active interfaces. The -a shows everything defined, up or down.

So as try to activate the interface, try 'ifconfig eth0 up' and post the results. It should activate the interface. You may, or may not see an IP address on the second line. If one doesn't show up, I'll need to knwo how you want to configure it. DHCP or static IP addresses, type of connection you have, router, etc.

If you see an IP address, try a browser and see what happens.

Let me know.

okay, I had to do that via sudo, but it went up I think as there was a 1 to the side of it when listed using lsmod.

also, ifconfig now gives eth0 as...

As you can see, there's no i.p. address, but isn't that a internet sort of thing? I guess they are used locally, but whether they get called something different, I don't know.

The connection is just a crossover cable (actually it was cat5 cable till I switched a couple of wires over, but it works, tested on windows) between the 2 machines, all I really want it for at the moment is to delete the files I don't want on the computer without having to go to it (Well, it is all the way downstairs! )

I'm trying to refine my ever expanding music collection, it seems a good idea to have it all happening on one computer which won't get used for anything else, mainly because it's not much good for anything else also, I have one of those little fm broadcasting things so all I have to do to hear the music is have a radio in the room with me I'm checking for dodgy files and the like.

So it's doubtful this machine will ever go online, but it might happen eventually, just not at the moment

So erm, what's next?

Are we nearly there yet?

This will work just fine, and it appears you have the correct wires switched to make it work as a direct cable. For now, we'll assume the cable is good.

You do need an IP address assigned to the nic's on both ends of the cable for this to work. There are two ways to get an IP address. One is if you have a DHCP server, most routers preform this funciton, or you can set one up in linux.

The second way is to define static IP addresses for each end of the connection. This is by far the easest way. To set up your eth0 nic in linux, you can edit a file, /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.

I'm going to cut and paste mine, you would only need to modify the IP addresss.

Note two things, the NETWORK field, and the IPADDR field. Anything that starts with 192.168 is a private non-routable address. That is fine for what you want to do. The third field can be anything from 0 to 254 with a mask of 255.255.255.0 The last digits, the 21 is my machine. Other machines on my network only have the last number different. So, if you make you windoze side 192.168.1.1 then make linux 192.168.1.2 same mask on both machines.

You will need a /etc/hosts file. Here is a sample of what to put in there. The hosts file is one place the TCP/IP stack looks to resolve how to route a IP packet. So on one machine you define the IP addresses and names of the other machines on your network. Here is part of mine.

Presto is a laptop I have, and Snail is my old W98 machine in the basement. The IP addr 127.0.0.1 is my loopback interface. I added extra names to make life easier for me. You don't have to. Your file on the linux side will have the ip address and name of the windoze machine. In windoze you need to define a hosts file, in there you add the linux machine.

You need to edit these files with root privledges.

The last thing to do, other than test is to set up a default route. That is done with the 'route' command. Yu can look at the man page if you type in a konsole 'man route'

To add a route, 'route add 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev eth0' should do it. You can dump the routing table with the command 'route' by itself. Your route should be there.

Piece of cake, right? You will need to define the windoze side, i'm guessing you know how. Just make sure both ends belong to the same sub net, ( third decmial field ).

Active the linux end, 'ifconfig eth0 up' and try to ping the windoze machine. 'ping 192.168.1.1' hit enter. CTRL c cancels the ping command.

Let me know how it goes...