Box to Box

[coverup]

Samba on the average home network isnt all that difficult to setup. KDE's inbuilt samba config tool does a great job of adding and removing shares, in a really easy to understand and use interface. Just go to kcontrol/Configure your Desktop/Kde control center or whatever it's called there, Internet and Network, File Sharing.

 

James

good tip... Normally I tend to avoid GUIs and edit scripts directly, but samba has way too many options which could be confusing....

[iphitus]

good tip... Normally I tend to avoid GUIs and edit scripts directly, but samba has way too many options which could be confusing....

I'm the same, but the KDE one works so damned well, it's worth it.

[AussieJohn]

Thanks everyone especially Ian and James. James, following your suggestion I was able to get a connection to my windowbox for a once only and felt I was making a little headway but in the last 2 1/2 days I have been battling a problem of partition corruptions on my hard drive that my Mandriva 2006 was on ( I am using my Mandriva2005 at this moment which is shared with Windows2000 on another hard drive). Well the hard drive finally carked it totally. PCLinuxOS cannot detect it, nor the Mandriva2005 nor the install disk for Mandriva2006. Even the Weston Digital Diagnosis program failed all its tests. I swapped connections, cables and all sorts of things but to no avail. For quite a while I thought that I had some destructive file in my Music Partition (it was the largest at 30Gb) so I deleted and reformatted it. Some other partition would then play up. Finally I used the WD Diagnostic program to deep format with all zeros. Did a fresh reinstall of 2006 and updated everything and reinstalled all my music and data and everything seemed to be aok even to the point of doing 3 successful reboots. Next reboot showed Grub was wiped out and trying to use PCLinuxOS or Mandriva2005 to access Boot in Mandriva2006 was impossible as was everything else in /. Now PCLinuxOS doesn't even see an hdc drive.

 

I am planning on getting 2 of WDs new SATA II 160Gb 16Mb cache 5yr warranty HDDs during the week.

 

Since I bought both the present HDDs at the same time I feel that maybe the present working one is a risk for the present so I am not going to experiment with it in the meantime. Once I get the sata hds up and running I will continue this linking objective so expect to hear from me about it in a week and a half or so.

 

Cheers. John.

[AussieJohn]

You wouldn't read about it. Just 5hours after my last post on this thread, the remaining Hard Drive packed it in. Talk about being prophetic.

 

I am working from my window box at the moment with its tiny 8Gb drive.

I have reflashed the mainboard bios but that made no difference. The mainboard appears to be totally OK because I am using the Windowbox HDD and its cd burner wired across into my Mandriva box and all is working well at the moment. Fingers, arms, legs everything is crossed till the new SATA HDDs arrive Friday or Mon/Tues of next week.

 

Cheers. John.

[iphitus]

Painful isnt it AussieJohn?

 

I had my two hdd's die within hours, last year. My laptop's drive was dying, so I backed it all up to my external drive - which once I completed backing up, was promptly knocked off the desk by one of the dogs and died outright, taking my music, videos, games and backup with it.

 

Fortunately I managed to backup the rest of my laptop across the network to dad's computer...

 

The best ways to check on hdd's is via dmesg, generally a dying hdd will spit out a lot of 'curly bracket' errors, and via smartctl, you can check for errors recorded by the drive, and run tests.

 

James

Edited May 15, 2006 by iphitus

[ianw1974]

I've heard people experience a lot of problems with Western Digital drives. I tend to buy Seagate mostly, haven't bought Western Digital for a long time since someone commented on them a while ago.

 

Luckily, I've never had a hard disk failure as of yet, so hopefully I'm not tempting fate on this. I think I better get another 160GB disk so I can mirror the rest of my 160GB drive. So far, my machine only has the / partition of 20GB mirrored, so my data is at risk, but the OS is OK.

[iphitus]

I've heard people experience a lot of problems with Western Digital drives. I tend to buy Seagate mostly, haven't bought Western Digital for a long time since someone commented on them a while ago.

 

Luckily, I've never had a hard disk failure as of yet, so hopefully I'm not tempting fate on this. I think I better get another 160GB disk so I can mirror the rest of my 160GB drive. So far, my machine only has the / partition of 20GB mirrored, so my data is at risk, but the OS is OK.

 

The one that fell off the desk was a western digital. So they're definitely at fault there :P

 

I've got 2 seagates in this computer that are spinning along very well. They're damned quiet, and run without any problems.

[AussieJohn]

Ian, these two 80Gb WDs have lasted me 5 to 6 years and the present one, a little 8Gb is giving no signs of giving up. I regard WD as being highly reliable, so much so that the two new SATAs that are on their way to me are WD also. Plus they have a 5 yr warranty. When all the kerfuffle was going on a few years back about HDDs of different big name brands dying suddenly and randomly because of a faulty chip manufacturer in Taiwan, WD was the only HDD manufacturer not effected and still kept their 3 yr warranty when everyone else was suddenly dropping to 12 month warranty. Amazing how people forget these kind of things.

All brands have failures from time to time but a lot of stories are myths that are taken as truths.

I have absolutely NO hesitation in recommending WD to everyone.

 

Thanks James for that particular hint. Have made a special note of it since I didn't know that one.

 

They say a mans best friend is his dog but you sometimes wonder don't you.

 

Cheers. John.

Edited May 16, 2006 by AussieJohn