My network upgrades

Had some fun last weekend upgrading the home network. Previously I simply had a couple of machines networked via a crossover cable however, as those who read regularly will know, some more machines have decended my way and I made the decision to move to Linux.

Suse Linux 9.2 Professional

You should know that I'm a complete Linux newbie, not inexperienced or a novice, I can only truly, hand on heart say that I'm a newbie. Many people at work have given me help and advice, although this can be a little offputting when they are all advocates of different distributions (Mandrake, Red Hat and Debian). But thank you to you all, you know who you are.

Saying all that though, I have found my first few days with the latest Suse a breaze. The installation went perfectly on my chosen first sacrifice (currently called simply Server#1). I managed to get ftp, telnet and Samba all working happily with my Windows machines (albeit after remembering to allow the ports in the Suse firewall).

In the current setup all the machines have fixed IP addresses, I decided against setting up a DHCP server on Linux as I'll be getting broadband in the next few weeks and I will leave the address serving to the router.

New network

This means that I currently have three machines on the network, more than a simple crossover cable can handle. So I also spent the weekend getting some new network hardware up and running. A D-Link 10/100 8-port switch, lots of Cat5 cabling and a KVM switch.

Only one slight hiccup...I had not thought to check whether all my machines have PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, or course one didn't. The oldest of my currently running machines, it never occured to me to check for that.

With the help of some friends (both very good sys-admins) I managed to track down the correct adaptor for the keyboard (already have one for the mouse) so this should all be working by next week.

T.B.D.

Next up is installing Linux on Server#2, then thinking of better names for them all! After that I am waiting for some memory and HD drives for the final machine and I am all done until I get a new workstation to replace my main machine which must remain Windows :(

Just so you know I'm in New York from Thursday for a week, so you won't hear from me. When I get back we are into the final few days before the launch of Open Harmonise, very exiting.