Re: Networking

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, Ian W. Wright wrote:

> As a complete Linux novice, I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by all
> the expertise displayed on this list and so it has taken a while for me
> to pluck up courage to ask what, to most of you, will probably seem a
> couple of very simple and stupid questions.

As someone else said, these aren't simple questions: fortuanately, though,
the answers are pretty simple! If there are any other novices lurking on
the list; I do encourage you to speak up if you have a problem - that's
what a lot of us are on this list for, as well as the general linux
disucssion.

> software - so that I can, at least, print from any machine and exchange
> or access files between machines?

I'll try not to rehash what others have said; but yes, networking is
physically very easy. Software wise is a little more tricky, but not much
more - there are apps which make it very easy! There are also some very
good books, online docs and HOWTOs about this: you might want to read up
on some of them (like Networking HOWTO, Ethernet HOWTO), you'll feel a lot
better prepared.

> Also, is it possible to combine the
> computing power of the various machines (build my own mini Cray!!!! ;0))
> - something like having a multi-processor machine. Is there software
> which would do this or would it also need programmes written
> specifically for such an environment?

Beowulf has been mentioned already, there is other clustering technology
as well. Generally, they need special software or modifications to
software to work well. However, nobody has mentioned X-sessions yet: this
allows you to run a graphical program from a remote machine. A typical way
goes like this:

I'm on machine CS001. I want to run a program on machine CS002. From
CS001, I type xhost +cs002.my.domain, and this adds CS002 to my 'access
list'. I then login into cs002. I type 'export
DISPLAY=cs001.my.domain:0.0' (because I'm running bash as my shell, other
shells will use setenv, etc.) - this tells cs002 that all the graphical
programs I run over this link should display themselves on CS001. Then, I
just type the command for the program, i.e. netscape; and it comes up on
my local screen. Very easy, very compatible, and requires *no* extra
software that you don't get with a standard distribution. It sounds a
little compilcated here, but trust me, if you try it a couple of times
you'll very quickly get the hang of it. Like the rest of linux, it's not
difficult, it's just different ;)

Cheers,

Alex.

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