A while back I decided I wanted to try out Linux. That didn't last too long. It was functional, but too cumbersome for day to day tasks I perform. I'm sure it can do everything I need it to, but I just didn't have the time to learn a new operating system... which is what I really want to do with it. To know Linux as well as I know Windows is a goal of mine, albeit not a very urgent one.
That said, circumstances arrived that actually had me look into using Linux, instead of Windows, for a project.
We have a "server" at work that just serves files. It was running Vista Ultimate and it worked for a time. Until many people started telling me that they couldn't access it. A restart would temporarily fix the issue, but I knew that since this wasn't a "server class" OS, it would continue to have these issues. I looked for ways to up the number of concurrent connections for the "server" but, alas, none were forthcoming. Mostly replies to said questions were, "YOU NEED WINDOWS SERVER". Well, I thought, I could do that. I have those disks, but... and here's the thing, I don't have a license for it. I could have just installed and cracked it, yes, but 1) that's illegal, 2) cracks usually don't last forever, 3) I was itching to try Linux in a server capacity.
So I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Server Ed. and with the help of a couple of websites and some consulting with my brother (who has experience with setting up his own Linux/SAMBA Server) I plunged head first.
Here I found the install instructions. Since I had 2 Hard Drives (besides the one for the OS install) instead of the one he uses I had to think a bit to get it to work (hint: instead of mounting to /media/store, I used /media/ntfs1 and /media/ntfs2 for the mount points). I knew that one Unix/Linux class I took would come back to me. I also changed the workgroup to one we all use here. We're actually on a domain, but putting the domain name there worked fine. And the fact that I can keep the 2 data hardrives the current file system (NTFS) was also great. Since both are 1T drives and pretty full... let's just say it would have sucked to have to change the file system... unless it's as easy as converting FAT32 to NTFS. Then it would now have been bad. But I didn't check out that possibility... for now anyway.
Here I found a light GUI to smooth the process along. Working in the vi editor with a wonky keyboard just sucks, so I installed the GUI and used gedit to perform all the text editing. Just remember to open it (gedit) from the Command Line as root (if you are following the tutorial replacing vi with gedit).
And this helped me out with being able to share to folders without someone having to login. Please note, this is not exactly secure. I am fully aware of this, but given this situation (we're behind a firewall, and none of the files are exactly confidential/security risks) it works for me.
Here are the fstab and smb.conf currently being used, for reference.
It's working great and multiple people can connect and browse the folders. Now the only slowdowns will be hardware dependent, not software.
2 Comments:
holy crap that smb.conf is long! Of course only like 20 lines of it are uncommented. project looks good. Any major hiccups?
yeah, it's just the deafult files with a few lines added/changed.
none yet, running like a champ and resart and is up in under a minute.
I want to get vnc running, but server doesn't come with it preinstalled so i'm having some trouble getting it up and running. i can connect via putty (SSH) so i can command line it all, but i would like to get in via a remote desktop. either way, it's nice.
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