Excuse my ignorance, but i want to know whether i need a router for my simple network. Let me explain what i want to do. I want to set up one machine in order to experiment with Linux or FreeBSD. It will be a headlees machine since i don't have a second monitore. I want to connect to this machine through ssh using my xp machine which will in the same room as the test machine. I will not need an internet connection for any of these machines. So my question is how do i connect these two, can i just use an ethernet cable for connection. Or do i need a router to make the connection possible. If yes, is there a way that my linux/BSD machine can be configured to play the role of the router, and yet being able to experiment with it as a normal OS.

thanks

No router required. The simplest method to connect two PCs is with a crossover ethernet cable.

Hi,

You do not need a router for what you want to do but it is the simplest option. Without a router you can connect your two machines via a crossover cable. You can probably buy them but its easy to make them with the right tool. You are effectively making a piece of cat 5 bi-directional. Here is some instructions: http://www.perfectdrivers.com/howto/crossover.html. You would then connect the machines together with it NIC to NIC, load the ip stack on each machine (making sure they are on the same subnet) and ping each other. Once you can ping each other you would need to load some kind of xclient on to your XP box (so it can display Unix xwindows) then from within this xclient ssh to Linux, login, set the display to your XP IP address and you should be away.

Once you have set the display from the XP xclient type 'xclock' and see if the clock appears, if it does your seeing this from your Linux box.

If you choose to buy a router the nice thing about this is you could have more than one client connect and you could do it over wireless so no need for cables from XP to the router.

Hope this helps,

Colin

thanks for your help. Following the last message, i was planning in using PuTTY to connect to my test box. I don't mind not being able to have X server, but if i want is it possible to start the x server from a terminal within PuTTY, by simpy typing startx.

Thanks again.

Or:
http://www.tightvnc.com/

This is not a secure connection but since your on a standalone network it is not required. You can tunnel it through ssh if desired.

I dont think it is possible, I have tried this with a xwindows client and it just errors. It may be thta its just too much to pass from server to client without clever software to manage it. Looks like you need a remote control client as suggested instead.

C

You could always just get a KVM switch so you could just switch the monitor from computer to computer when you wanted to.