Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3901 mails)

[elefino <kevinmcl@xxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 03 January 2005 23:45, Örn Einar Hansen wrote:
> Þann Þriðjudagur 04 janúar 2005 03:15 skrifaði elefino:
> > I've only heard from half a dozen people on this thread, and among
> > them they disagree about whether NFS takes the computer to lunch when
> > another NFS server goes away.  Surely out of the hundreds or thousands
> > of members of this list, there must be more than a few who have two
> > Linux boxes sharing files/directories across a simple home network.
> > What are all the rest of you doing?
>
>   This is a bit different, than you what you stated originally, where
> you said the upstairs was up all the time ... if neither machine is up
> all the time, you're reduced to using something like samba as a server
> on both, where you simply browse to the shares you want to use.  The
> "preferred" way, is to use one as a server and have the other share it's
> resources, thus reducing bandwidth and overhead ... using both as
> servers that may or may not be present at any given moment where
> write/read is attempted, reduces their value as desktop workstations and
> limits your options.

Upstairs is up most of the time, by my choice. However, it is also the PC 
on which I learn about anything new (to me) like this NFS stuff and 
like SAMBA that no longer works for me (since 9.2 and the replacement 
PC downstairs). That means I may screw up my system for days at a time... 
look how long this simple task is taking me. Not knowing what-all services 
and things are really involved, whenever I change settings and try again 
to get NFS or SAMBA to serve... I shutdown and restart in order to be 
absolutely sure that services and daemons and things get restarted with 
new values. That's overkill, and not the Linux way, but it saves two weeks 
of turnaround where somebody finally points out to me that I'd been 
overlooking some service/daemon with a one-letter name that was 
absolutely crucial to what I'd been trying to do, but wasn't mentioned in 
the docs that I'd seen.

If my wife was constrained to wait for me to get my act together each 
time she wanted to work on her own PC (because I held all the shared 
files and had screwed up my PC again), she'd be justifiably ready to kill 
me.

What I should probably do is to set up a third PC, as server, on which 
I conservatively make no changes until I've learned how on my desktop 
PC, but that's not really an option just now.

So, you seem to be saying that I should drop my recent enthusiasm 
for NFS and go back to sorting out SAMBA for both the Linux-to-Win98 
and the Linux-to-Linux situations?  If that's the recommendation, I'll 
be going back to your long SAMBA post of the other day, for which detail 
I thank you very much.

Cheers,

kevin (still an isolated island in a tiny pond)