That's an opinion, a very misguided one.

The actual version should be 10.04.1 - has some more recent updates - same product - my oversight.

The install process will include the partitioning. It is menu driven and not too bad. If you choose Manual partition you can then remove any existing partitions on the drive WHICH WILL REMOVE ALL DATA! and then create new partitions. I specified all of mine to be primary partitions just an old habit I guess. You will need one partition mounted as / (also called root) and one for swap space (about equal to the physical memory in the machine is a decent amount). I use the rest of the disk for data. Allowing that you end up with something like this...

sda1 - 10 GB mounted as /
sda2 - 1 - 3 GB as swap
sda3 - the rest - mounted as /data

g4l comes as an iso (CD image file). You can burn it to a CD with Nero or CD Creator on Windows or something similar on the Mac. The idea is to boot the server from the CD so the OS files are not in use. This makes them easy to backup and restore. To do the backup...

boot from the CD
when the loading completes enter g4l <Enter>
at the first menu select File Mode
then Select Partition where the image will be written
arrow down to sda3 and press the space bar - tab to OK
next Launch Client
sda1 will be highlighted so tab to the Image file line and enter something like /mnt/local/bkup_sda1
press F5
On the next screen I generally uncheck (tab to the item and press space bar) the options for Check partition... and Enter description
F5 to continue and an OK or two - that is all there is to it. When complete a few Cancels then type reboot <Enter>

Except that the permissions on the resulting file /data/bkup_sda1.000 will be restricted to root. sudo chmod 660 /data/bkup_sda1.000 will allow you as a mere mortal to move the file to a more convenient place or write it to DVD for posterity or whatever.

Ken

p.s. it looks like you were editing while I was typing - g4l is a bootable tool (better than Hawk-PE, well at least completely legal

Ken,

I have been running Ubuntu Desktop on this machine for the past week. I'm going to reinstall server soon but it will be a bit because I'd like to wait to get my PCI sata card. How difficult would it be to install server then later add a pci card with a sata drive? I also have a 500gb usb external I'd like to use. Ive been using it as a back up drive for the time being so it already has files on it. Would it be difficult to share that drive? I assume my 40 gig hard drive would be listed as hda, then a usb or sata drive would be sda or sdb. that leads to my next question... how does it decide which is sda and sdb? would the usb drive always be sdb if the sata drive is there?

anyway, i will be getting the pci sata card within a week and i'll tackle it all then. Unless it wouldnt be that much of a hassle to add the sata drive after installing ubuntu server.

Hi Dustin,

Ubuntu seems pretty good about detecting new hardware - at least that has been my experience with the gui environment. Go ahead and install server and play with it. It only takes a few minutes and worst case you can reinstall after adding the card and SATA drive.

Plug in the USB drive and "sudo fdisk -ul" or "df -h" Either will show you the drives. You should be able to share it with Samba or ssh.

As to how the drives are named... I thought I knew until I added a pci sata card and tried to install CentOS (public version of Red Hat enterprise Linux). It named them differently from what I expected. Normally...

motherboard sata0 = sda
motherboard sata1 = sdb
add in card port 1 = sdc
add in card port 2 = sdd
add in card port 3 = sde
add in card port 4 = sdf

USB will be something past the last installed drive.

Ubuntu uses UUIDs (unique identifiers for each formatted partition) so all of this can become irrelevant.

Install and play with it. Just be careful when you sudo - that will allow you do do some real damage

Ken

Ken,

My pci sata card will be here tomorrow so I'll get started on the endeavor within a few days. I havent forgotten. I'll keep you updated on my progress. Thanks for your help again.

Dustin

Hey Dustin,

That is good to hear. I have not been idle myself. I now have a Snow Leopard VMWare Virtual Machine running. I am in the process of figuring out how a Mac talks to other computers. From what I have been reading it seems that it will connect to Samba shares so that might serve you for both Windows and Mac. It should be able to connect to a Linux server with ssh but I have not gotten that to work yet.

Ken

My mac integrates well with the other machines, all my shares show up on the windows machines, and also on the others macs on the network in the sidebar in finder, also shows up well on the ubuntu machine. I have set up my Brother HL 2140 printer via the cups server on the ubuntu machine. the mac prints to it perfectly with just a little work. The windows 7 machine recognizes it in the network printers. the only problem I have at this time is the file transfer speed from my mac (which is wireless g) to my wrt54g running dd-wrt then wired to my ubuntu box. Im currently transferring a 2.5gb file and its taken about 45 minutes and still has about 700mb left. im averaging about 900k to 1.1 mb/sec transfer which is painfully slow.

I graduate from college here in just a few days so after that I'll have more time to tinker with this new endeavor. I'll keep you updated. if you have any questions on the mac let me know. ssh into my ubuntu box is a breeze. i can use ssh -x USERNAME@MACHINE then run the desktop from there and it works perfectly (on the mac).

ken,

went ahead and installed server 10.04 lte like we talked about. updated everything... so whats the next step with webmin

ken,

ended up getting webmin installed myself so hopefully I did everything right. Its accessible via my network so it looks like I got everything there ok. let me know some tips if you have any?

Great news Dustin! When I installed webmin with dpkg it complained about unmet dependencies. The dependencies themselves seemed to be dependent on each other. Bottom line what finally worked for me was to install webmin with dpkg and then run which installed the needed dependencies. Webmin is quite handy. I am learning its capabilities as I use it.

Have you setup samba yet? I generally edit the configuration file /etc/samba/smb.conf by hand. The default one has a lot of decent examples to work from. Creating a share point or sharing a printer for Windows is simple. More involved is deciding what your security model is going to be. I only have a couple of user accounts to deal with so I create the accounts on the server and set the samba passwords by hand. When the Windows user changes their password on the Windows machine they can then change their samba password with smbpasswd over an ssh connection (use putty on the Windows machines). Unless you want to establish a Windows domain and integrate it with the Linux server - I have chosen not to do so

And congratulations on your upcoming graduation! What is next - grad school or the job market?

Ken

Ken,

I found a tutorial online with all the info to force the necessary dependencies. I have webmin up and running and got it and ubuntu server updated no problem. I used the samba that came with ubuntu but still ended up having to sudo apt-get samba4 for some reason for it to be a running process. I am having trouble getting it set up properly. I want the shares to automatically show up in windows when I look in the network. They did before when I was running desktop but I'm having trouble with it now. I'll look a little more into it here in the next week. I have a final exam monday then I'm finished.

I did end up setting up my printer via CUPS. That's the system I had in place before while using Ubuntu Desktop so I set up my dns and ip settings the same on the server install and everything (once I setup the cups config file) worked as though nothing had changed as far as printing is concerned.

Sharing files on the other hand... That's a different story.

Do I just need to setup one additional user account for other computers to log into my server? I have the administrator password which is also the username on my server. Would I need to create one additional user for the other computers to share? Also, I want these users to be able to write to the folders on the server but not delete them, I know that i must change the permissions and I can do this through webmin it seems via changing numbers? The settings on my /data1 folder are 755. As of now my folders are not showing up when I click on the "fileserver" (which is my system name) network link under networking in Windows. Before I could click on "fileserver" and immediately I would see my shared folders and shared printer. Now I do not see anything.

I know this may be foreign to you, but I CAN access the /data1 folder via finder in Snow Leopard if I use the GO > Connect to Server option and use smb://192.168.2.101. This brings up a login prompt where I can enter my ubuntu username and password and access the files. However it does not show up the way it did before as simply a machine like the windows machines on the network currently display themselves.

Nonetheless I'll read more and ask questions as I come across them regarding the sharing of the files and especially when I get the other HDD in.

As for school, I actually graduate from nursing school. I already have a job in the emergency department in the larger trauma center in town which I will start in a few weeks. My plans are to become a CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist). I'm required to have two years of critical care experience prior to applying, as well as other certifications to lengthen the acronyms behind my name, so it will take the two years. It's a Doctoral program that's 36 months in length but the pay increase is nearly 4x my current salary which would make the effort worthwhile.

Needless to say I'll have some time in the upcoming weeks to really play with this server so I'm looking forward to it. Thanks again for all your help, I had this thread printed out as a guide as I installed this last night. I got hung up on the manual partitioning and it took me a few minutes to figure out that I didn't have the option checked on / to make it boot. Once I got that out of the way it was smooth sailing. I'll keep an eye out for any questions you may have about OSX. It's still a learning process for me as well but I'll answer what I can.

Dustin

Dustin - I sent you an email via LQ re. education etc. As to the Samba shares...

Inter-OS security integration is a real PITA. At my last employer I had many different user IDs depending on the platform and they were generally independent of each other.

- Mainframe (MVS later zOS) allowed access to almost every database or other resource except Unix System Services on zOS
- HPUX Unix - a separate account on each server
- Oracle on HPUX - a separate account for each database - no relation to the server account for the server which hosted the database
- Windows network - one account on the domain allowed access to all servers on the domain (dependent on permissions of course). This account had no relation to any account on any other platform.

On my home network I am the OWNER of all directories and files on the Linux server and ADMINISTRATOR on all of the Windows machines. That sort of overrides the security restrictions you want for your "civilian" users. Let me setup some civilian accounts here and see if I can provide some helpful examples.

Please post a description of the users in your Windows environment and how they relate between the different machines. For example user "Joe" has a non-admin account on each Windows machine and user "Mary" has a non-admin account on only the XP machine. That will help to make the examples relevant to your environment.

Here is how I have my shares setup in /etc/samba/smb.conf I don't remember what locking = no does - will have to look that up. However, since my account is the owner of all the stuff some of this may be moot.

Something else to have a look at is umask. I have not changed it on my server but for a multi-user environment it might be of value. I have been bitten by umask. Had a job on an HPUX server which copied a file from the mainframe by ftp and then loaded the data to an Oracle table or some such. It worked until something caused the file on the HPUX box to get deleted. When a new file landed it gained different permissions than if it had simply overwritten the existing file. Finally tracked it down to a umask related issue. Other than that I have pretty much ignored umask.

Later,

Ken

Ken,

Sorry for the delay on my reply. I've finally taken the time to get everything set up on the server to the best of my abilities. I did finally install my sata drive and sata card. It is listed as sdb I believe and I had no trouble formatting it getting it mounted. I now have the hard drive installed and the server up and running. I have worked on samba and gotten it to work well with the windows 7 machines, currently using xcopy to copy music files to the sata drive as we speak. I'm using netatalk to communicate from the mac to the linux server which puts a lot of extra files when the mac looks in the folders which I see in windows. I know they are irrelevant but I'm a tidy person and I don't like to see junk in my folders. Anyway, I have the a firefly media server running which is sharing the directory full of my music.

Do you know of any other way to share the files using the same system in the mac? I dislike the number of extra files that the netatalk system places in the directories.

Also concerning the users i'm not sure if I have all the users set up properly. should I have a user setup for windows?
I only have two other people in the house using the system but 4 computers. two with windows 7 and two macs. I want all of them to have permissions to modify files as they please on the directories I have shared.

I don't know too much about Apple networking and file handling. I do recall that MANY years ago I would on occasion download (over a 2400 bps modem) a file from Usenet which ended up as two separate files. Same name, different extensions. I had a little utility which would put them back together into a .gif or .jpg or .mp3 or whatever. As I recall this phenomenon was related to the fact that the files had originated on a Mac. Seems the Mac stored the data for the picture or mp3 or document in one file and instructions for the OS as to how to process the file - what app to open it with etc. in the second file. Perhaps that is what you are seeing.

I came across this article - a lot of interesting Mac-speak http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/...achine-volume/

As far as user accounts - I would as a minimum setup an account on the Ubuntu server for each PERSON. Provided their Windows password matches the Ubuntu password they should be able to connect without issue. I am guessing it would be the same from the Mac. If the Mac username/password is passed to the server by netatalk they should be able to connect. If someone uses a different username on Windows and Mac - setup an account on the server for each. If you create the user account on the server with Webmin it will by default create a matching Samba account. The server also seems to keep the Linux and Samba passwords in sync - a nice touch.

Ken