RE: Networking

[Paul Sims <nospam [at] lombard.co.uk>]

As far as building a reliable network goes, if you can afford it go for
nice cheap NE2000-clone network cards with 10baseT (RJ45 connection) and a
cheap cheerful hub. You can make up the UTP cables yourself or buy
ready-made (can be expensive). A coax solution is prone to problems with
the coax cables especially if the Domestic Authorities take a dislike to
cables snaking under carpets :-) which can bring the whole network down.

If you can lay coax so it's fixed in position then give it a go, if cash is
really tight. Keep an eye on the local free ads paper for network card
hub bargains.

Software - nfs is a great way of mounting remote Unix drives as if they
were on your own pc; Samba will give access to the Windows drives
printer. Remote printing support is standard in Lnix so you can mount the
Linux printers easily using linuxconf etc.

Beowulf is your man when it comes to using distributed computing power over
the network. Interestingly, recent benchmarks on a large (specially
optimised) pc Beowulf cluster show the system can outstrip a Cray !!

This sounds like a great project - good luck to you. BTW, if you get hold
of a program called Webmin it'll make administering the config stuff very
easy - do it over the intranet when you've got the network running.

Finally, there's no such thing as a stupid question, just inadequate
answers. If you don't ask you won't learn. Welcome to penguin land !

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.

I have four computers sitting in various parts of my house and workshop,
all Pentiums, two with Windows 98 only, one with windows 95 and Redhat
linux 5.2 and one with RedHat 6.0 only and a couple of printers and a
scanner. So, bearing in mind that I have now given up work and am on a
small pension and so am rather cash limited, what do I need to
do/get/buy(yuk) to link all the machines together - hardware and
software - so that I can, at least, print from any machine and exchange
or access files between machines? 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?

Best wishes

Ian

--

Ian W. Wright
Sheffield, UK

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