1st of all I'm a new to linux and know basically very little. I am trying to get my linux pc networked with the small win2k network we have running. But I have no idea where to setup anything at. I was told by a friend that I would have to configure samba. but im not completely sure what that does. he said i would have to install it, but i did see a samba dir in /etc/samba. but everything was in there was greek to me. Where do i setup the ip address, and will linux work with tcpip, and what about internet connection sharing? Can anyone please help? Thanks in advance!!!

What exactly do you want to do with the Linux Box. If you want to make it look like a Win machine with Samba, then just give up now and install windows.

Do you want Linux to connect to a ICS machine to see the internet or do you want to have Linux be your gateway to the Internet? Linux will make an excellent gateway and a good firewall machine.

To configure Linux machine as a gateway you will need two NICs in the machine. One to access the local network and one to see the internet. All the details on how to do this can be obtained from Linux HOW-TO documents.

I check the following sites for linux documentation:

http://www.linuxdoc.org
http://www.linux.org

Look for the firewall how-to.

Be sure to use ipchains or iptables to configure a firewall if Linux is to be your gateway.

If you just want Linux to be a fileserver then you will need to either configure samba (yuk) or use a NFS client on the Win machines and setup a nfs server on Linux (easy).

Good Luck

Gary

Let me know what you are trying to do..

Despite as to what some people say, samba works a much better with windows than does NFS. For example, if you run samba you can map linux drives on all your windows machines, even windows 95 with no additional software. As long as the netbios protocol is installed you are ready to go.

Samba is very easy to configure (minimal configuration), if you just want to create one share, and do not want to share printers or anything else, it is rather trivial.

NFS works good with Unix systems, but SAMBA is much better when dealing with windows machines.

Either, remember that both NFS and SAMBA are very insecure, so make sure you have some kind of firewall between the systems and the internet. Also, if you are intending to have the linux machine run as your firewall and gateway (ie router), do not run NFS or SAMBA on this machine. It is not secure.

Let me know if you need more help and I'll walk you through the entire process.. Some of the Howtos out there scare new linux users, but we're here to help!

Joseph