From: Jim Osborn
Problem #1 (finally). If both machines are running Linux each can ping the other, but how do I access files on Igor from AbNormal and in the other direction? I'm sure that I'm missing something very simple in configuring the LAN, but I don't have the faintest clue as to what.
I've been happier since I set up my two-linux-machine lan with automounting. Previously I had created explicit directories as others have suggested. You'll want to read the man pages: automount(8), autofs(8), and most useful autofs(5) which gives the formats of the config file entries. I'll try to describe the basics: /etc/auto.master has a line for each machine you want to automount, pointing to a control file. In your case, on Igor, auto.master might have the line: /AbNormal /etc/auto.AbNormal Then in /etc/auto.AbNormal you might have lines like: dos -fstype=nfs,ro AbNormal:/msdos home -fstype=nfs,ro AbNormal:/home etc -fstype=nfs,ro AbNormal:/etc which will create, on Igor, the directory trees /AbNormal/dos when you try to access something there from Igor. For example, the file /home/frank/projects/brainlist on machine AbNormal, would appear as /AbNormal/home/frank/projects/brainlist on machine Igor. There are no doubt lots of elegant ways of organizing the trees and mountpoints to create the level of transparency you might want, but something like the above should get you started. You need to restart the automounter when you make changes to the *.master file, but not when you change the other files. And, of course, you need to have all the various filesystems and machines mentioned appropriately in /etc/exports and /etc/host* My SuSE 6.3 setup starts the automounter automatically at bootup for me; if yours doesn't, maybe you need to kick an entry in rc.config. Hope this helps. Cheers, Jim