Hello all,

I have a little experience with Linux, mostly installing then watching my Guru friends fix whatever I screw up. I haven’t had a really useful Linux machine before (I did have RH7 running on a 486DX as a router back in ’98, but a friend did all the work for that). I know a few commands and where most directories are but the simplest stuff eludes me.

Here is my current project:

Mandrake 10.0 on a 750Mhz Athlon machine with 392 megs of PC100/133 RAM, hda: 80gig Maxtor with “server” partitions, hdb: 20 gig Maxtor (NTFS).

What I want to use this for is as follows:
Role a) File server: I want the machine to auto synchronize my girlfriends share with her Windows (XP pro) machine’s My Documents folder on a set schedule.
Role b) She then needs to be able to access the server copies of those files from the computer labs in her university (she’s a grad student).
Role c) FTP server: so I can copy files from work to my home network
Role d) web server: why, because its fun.

So far – OS is installed, users are added (including smb passwords). Samba is configured and accessible from the local network. Apache 2 (ADVX) is installed and running, FTP server runs fine.

Problems:
1) I cannot access my public_html folder from either the local network or Internet. It connects, then gives the error: “Connection refused trying to contact 127.0.0.1”
2) I don’t know how to auto synchronize the shares (I suspect there is a simple cron job I can setup but that’s the extent of my understanding)
3) I don’t know what tool/software package/setup to use in order to give my girlfriend worthwhile (not simply FTP) access to her files. Perhaps a remote desktop/TightVCN setup? Advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
4) As it stands all of this is horribly insecure. I would like to lock it down while retaining functionality.

I’m going to keep researching. But any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-KS

Your webserver problem sounds like it may be running on a different port, or the port you're trying to access it on is blocked by a router in between you and the comp. For File access, you could use samba, or if you use KDE, I belive there is a dameon built in called lisa.

Thanks for responding.

I have port 80 and 8080 both forwarded to that machine in the router setup. I can try putting it in the DMZ to see if that fixes it, but then I have a host of other issues. What other ports could possibly be causing the issue?

-KS