advice on home networks
 

hi all,

i want to set up a home network. i've currently got a laptop and a pc that access the net. they are both using individual software firewalls. now i'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to networking. so my question is... how much work would it be to get slack (pc) and windows (laptop) running on a hardware router and also setting up samba so that i could backup the laptop to the pc? like i said, i'm not the greatest when it comes to networks, but if someone could point me into the right direction or to a site that would explain a lot of this... please do. how secure is it running samba on a home network... i'm always afraid of people accessing my stuff.

sorry for the lack of order in my post... i'm just shooting out ideas that are in my head.

thanks in advance,
drisay.

Well, I have almost the same setup (2xSlack 1xWindows98) and it's really easy.

Just make sure that your slack machine has an entry in /etc/hosts with the IP address of your Windows machine.

Do the same for the Windows machine, the file should be in c:\windows\ and named lmhosts.

This may be a little tricky if you are using DHCP, since you need to write down the addresses assigned to each machine by your hardware firewall/router. On the other hand, DHCP will usually assign always the same IP address to the same PC, so it's just a matter of using it once.

Also make sure your firewalls are configured properly on each machine, so that they can 'talk' to each other and not reject every packet.

For Samba, read the documentation: 'apropos samba' is your friend, and also take a look at http://www.samba.org this site has a lot of docs.

Especially this one :

http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/toc.html

Samba is essentially configured using /etc/rc.d/rc.samba and /etc/smb.conf, make sure you read both files before doing anything...

Hope this helps! :D

For an extremely thorough overview of samba: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/smb.conf.5.html

and if you dig around in;
file:/usr/doc/samba-3.0.5
file:/usr/share/swat/help
'The Man' was kind enough to give you more to read than you can say grace over.

great, thanks for the replies. i'll give it a try and let you guys know how things went. i may have some more questions later on. and yes, i am using dhcp to connect to @home.