5.5 Networking
5.5.1 Would it be worth it to set up my home
network?
5.5.2 How to set up my home network?
5.5.3 I have problems configuring my ppp dial out
5.5.4 How to browse the net from my networked
computer without an internet connection
5.5.5 How to use Samba?
5.5.6 Sendmail
5.5.7 Simple web server (running Apache)
5.5.8 Simple ftp server
5.5.9 How can one access my computer from the
outside world when I am on the net using phone connection?
5.5.10 Can my home computer get broken into?
5.5.1 Would it be worth it to set up my home network?
This is an excellent idea. It will let you use the machines that are in your closet now because they were not powerful enough to run standalone. The benefits include sharing hard drives, zipdrives, CDROMs, modem, printers, even soundcards, running programs remotely (the text or graphics mode), browsing the Internet on all computers at the same time over one phone connection. If you ever lose control of your machine, you may also be able to shut it down remotely and thus avoid possible problems--see the answer on shutting down for details.
5.5.2 How to set up my home network?
Hardware. Your hardware must be set up properly. Your network card should have been autodetected and set up during the initial Linux installation. If you added a network card later, chances are it was autodetected and configured during a subsequent bootup (by kudzu). If it wasn't, you may want to set up your network card now. If you have more than one network card on your computer, you may also need to set up the second cards manually, since Linux will autodetect only 1 network card.
Under Linux, most drivers for network cards are implemented as kernel modules. So setting up a card manually involves just inserting the proper module with its parameters. You don't need to recompile the kernel, nor even reboot your computer (unless you have a very uncommon card). To figure out what module(s) and parameters you need, you may want to consult the documentations that comes with the kernel source code, e.g.:
less /usr/src/linux-2.4/Documentation/networking/net-modules.txt
If needed, you can list all the modules available for your kernel using something like:
modprobe -l | more
If you need more help, see the Linux Network Administrator Guide (file /usr/share/doc/LDP/nag on your system or check http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/). This excellent guide is known as nag.
There are many ways of inserting a module into a kernel. For a network card, the simplest is to start, as root, netconf and specify the module name there. An alternative is to start an X-terminal, execute "su" (to make yourself a root) and then run /usr/bin/kernelcfg.
In most cases, you don't have to specify the parameters (IRQ and address) for your module--the module will know what they should be. However, the parameters were a problem during my setup of two network cards on one computer--you must make sure that you don't have any hardware conflicts. A common source of problems is that the card wants to configure on IRQ 5, which is occupied by the SoundBlaster, or IRQ 3 which conflicts with the second serial port (COM2, cua1, ttyS1). Inspecting the files /proc/interrupts, /proc/ioport and reading bootup messages may help.
For example, my WD8013 card (same as SMC Elite and SMC Elite plus, according to nag) runs under IRQ 10 (set by a jumper on the card and I specified the IRQ in the kernel module setup), under the address 0x300 and uses the "WD" module. My "SMC EtherEZ" card (no jumper settings on the card) runs under IRQ 9, address 0x240 and uses "SMC EtherEZ" module. Please make sure you don't omit the leading
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