How Do Your Machines Talk to Each Other? 114
VonGuard asks: "I'd imagine this is a common scenario out there for Slashdot readers: I have multiple desktops, all sitting right next to each other and all running different OS's. Linux, Mac OS X and 9, Windows 98, and XP. The problem is, despite these machines being only inches arpart physically, in the digital world, they are miles apart. I have no single way to get them all to talk to each other. NFS is impossibly complex, Appletalk is unreliable thanks to netatalk, while PCMacLan, and Samba make me feel like I'm giving into the Empire. Isn't there a simpler way to get files from one of these machines to the other? Right now, I use webservers and write little HTML files that link to the files on each machine. Isn't there a better way to do this?" Is there really a network sharing standard that works across a number of operating systems aside from Samba? Truth be told, Samba "works-for-me", so that's what I us. However, when it comes to simple file copying, sometimes a simple scp is all I need. What protocols do you use in networks that consist of 3 or more operating systems?
rsync (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:rsync (Score:2)
Re:rsync (Score:2)
In my configuration; I run the server on my w2k desktop (with the big drive) and use the unison client from my laptop to sync files (bookmarks, the my documents folder, etc) across the two systems. Unison detects changes and propagates them, if there is a conflict it will prompt you or can even launch diff (for ascii files, you're kinda screwed if it's binary tho
Re:rsync (Score:2)
The biggest difference is that Unison is a bi-directional sync, while rsync is one-way. If you'd read the Unison Home Page, you might see that it's very clearly spelled out there. (There's a decent overview on that page, and the gory details are all in the docs, if you'd bother to read them...
If you need a syncrhonize
Suppression of revolution (Score:5, Funny)
Hah, they don't. I don't need the devious little things plotting behind my back. If they can't talk... they can't revolt.
Unless, of course, my brutal oppression is what pushes them to bloody revolution...
Uh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uh.. (Score:4, Informative)
OR you could just add WebDAV to Apache on either the Linux or OS X machine and be done with it all.
Re:Uh.. (Score:2)
Re:Uh.. (Score:2)
Is that only in XP Pro, or is it also in Home? He didn't say which version he has.
Re:Uh.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uh.. (Score:2, Informative)
At LAN parties (Windows 9x,XP), we use Filezilla ( link to sourceforge [sourceforge.net]) for all of our file transfers.
There are clients and servers available for all platforms. In fact, if you're using OSX (you spoke of Macintosh), it has the standard *nix tools included in the install.
Don't make it harder tha
Re:Uh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Actually TFTP is trivial, I believe.
(yes, this is a dumb joke)
Re:Uh.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Uh.. (Score:1)
Re:Uh.. (Score:2)
FTP doesn't cut it (Score:3, Insightful)
But then, whenever you needed to copy a file, you'd have to make sure an FTP server is running here, an FTP client is running there, the directories are right...
I want seamless integration. I want to be able to refer to remote files or directories as easily as files or directories in a local directory. Is it too much to ask?
Re:FTP doesn't cut it (Score:2)
Re:FTP doesn't cut it (Score:1)
Re:Uh.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I laughed when I read this, but you've obviously never had the pleasure of working with ftp on Mac OS 9. No one should ever have to know that much about resource forks just to share files. Ever try to explain that when you d/l from some Mac OS 9 servers from some non-mac ftp clients, the file gets binhex'ed for no apparent reason (even if they don't have or need a resource fork). Thankfully, I'm not at that job anymore, and OS 9 is dying for all but the niche of
FTP Triangles... (Score:2)
The protocol supports moving files between hosts A and B using a third machine C as the controller. You can use your Win9x machine to order your WinXP and Mac OS X machines to exchange files. That is a good trick to earn some geek points.
I don't know of a utility that provides this ability, but I've coded it myself. It isn't too difficult to do.
Re:FTP Triangles... (Score:1)
This Server to Server feature is called FXP.
Heres [freshmeat.net] a decent cmdline version i find quite useful.
You've already given in (Score:5, Insightful)
Samba is nothing to be ashamed of. I know plenty of folks who use it with no MS OSes in the mix at all.
You seem to know it is probably going to be the simplest solution
Re:You've already given in (Score:5, Funny)
I have opened my Computerus Geekus Bibleus, or Computer Geek Bible for those who don't speak fluent Latin, and it says here, in the Book of "Networking", Chapter 0x03, Verse 0x00, "Thou shalt not use the protocol known as SMB/CIFS on any sort of network, being of Ethernet, Token Ring, Appletalk, or others of this sort, when thou wishest to export thine directory trees, exceptest as thou dost use the Good Software Package that He calls Samba. This Package may only be installed upon thine computers which run some Unix variant, whether they be *BSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or another." So, as you can see for yourself, you don't need to worry about giving in to the Empire! The good book tells you that it is completely alright.
Re:You've already given in (Score:2)
For those of you who are still working on your Latin, here's a couple pages that may help you:
Common Expressions [byzantinec...ations.com]
Less Common Expressions [byzantinec...ations.com]
Good luck! I hope you don't mispronounce any of it and end up in gladiator school!
Re:You've already given in (Score:1)
I chuckle to think of how often "Suppedisne?" is asked of the Pope.
Re:You've already given in (Score:1)
Re:You've already given in (Score:1)
The ORIGINAL text is written in Lisp.
Re:You've already given in (Score:2)
</nitpick>
Re:You've already given in (Score:1)
netatalk problems? (Score:1)
Re:netatalk problems? (Score:1, Insightful)
And maybe s/he's trying to avoid reinventing the wheel - this has gotta be a pretty common situation. Although I've gotta agree with another poster, why not Samba?
Not *that* hard (Score:3, Informative)
Linux-to-Windows and Linux-to-Netware was quite a bit harder. The SMB and Netware clients that come with most Linux distros are pretty good, but the most obvious and well-documented way to set them up is an ugly kludge where you initialize the clients in a hand-rolled script. I insisted on figuring out how to do it "correctly" by editing the network config files. Took too much time, and I never got it working exactly right. But it was servicable.
I don't remember most of what I did, but I do have an important hint: on Win2K you almost always want to map a share to a drive, rather than accessing the share directly. Very slow otherwise. I think XP is a little better this way.
I haven't worked a lot with Macs, but from what I've seen, they're particulary good with file sharing.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, a Debian user? (Score:5, Informative)
That's when I decided to dig into the world of NetInfo - the NIS-like information system for Mac OS X. Basically, I now configured my Mac OS X client as a NIS client, which also auto-mount file shares from my Linux server via NFS. It's not that hard to set up, really. A nice side effect is that the network drives perform significantly better than they did using AFP/Netatalk.
Of course, I also run Samba on my server. If you are looking for a single solution/protocol across platforms, then that's probably the route to go. Mac OS X comes with Samba.
Then, if you are looking for file synchronization tools (as opposed to network file sharing), let me recommend a little utility called "unison". Runs on Linux, Mac OS X (UNIX), and Windows.
SSH & SCP (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SSH & SCP (Score:2)
Re:SSH & SCP (Score:2)
Re:SSH & SCP (Score:2)
Re:BeOS (Score:1)
X2VNC (Score:5, Informative)
Also, OS-X speaks samba, so there's less and less need for the appletalk protocol.
Re:X2VNC (Score:2)
Re:X2VNC (Score:2)
limitations (Score:5, Interesting)
PCs: Samba
Mac: netatalk
Misc: ftp
So if all else fails, they can use FTP.
But seriously, by discounting Samba based on the fact that it "makes [you] feel like [you're] giving into the Empire" is a really stupid reason. If it works, it works and you should use it. I mean, if you really didn't want to feel like you were giving into the "Empire" you wouldn't have a Microsoft box on your desktop at all, would you? So instead of being a hypocrite, just use the solution that works. And remember that Samba is open source, if that makes you feel any better.
But I suppose you could always use FTP or http://ubiqx.org/cifs/ (but even CIFS uses SMB).
In a pinch, HTTP/FTP (Score:1)
On the upside, it works with offsite computers as well.
A variety of ways. (Score:3, Informative)
CIFS/SMB for filesharing, since I have 2 Windows machines, and haven't taken the time to learn AFS/Coda. (samba, native windows implimentations)
Secure IMAP for sharing email. (courier-imap-ssl)
ssh, scp, and sftp for controlling, moving a few files, and forwarding X connections between machines. (openssh)
SMTP and NNTP proxies for mail and news. (exim in smarthost mode, leafnode/slrnpull)
midentd for forwarding identd requests in the NAT.
iptables for NATting the network, and xinetd to forward posts in.
Hmmm, I think that covers most of the information that my machines pass around to each other. :) You were probably just looking for imformation on
sharing files though.
Three letter file sharing is cool! (Score:4, Informative)
Everything is configured to be an SMB server. Sun, Mac, Linux and BSD also export the shares as NFS servers. SMB, while an awful standard, just plain works thanks to the dedicated members of the Samba team (and all the forks of it). Use it and don't feel "slimy" just cause M$ made it so widely used. NFS isn't *that* difficult. If you've got many different types of boxes, you can easily do a "man" of the necessary stuff under everything but Mac OS X. Do a reply to this if you need to get it going on OS X since it's not as straightforward.
Three of the XP boxen are really just clients, so they normally pull from the rest when necessary (MP3, AVI, home dirs, etc). Unix boxen (except the Mac) use pam/ldap to avoid duplication and i'm working on getting kerberos to tie (most of) them all together (someday I'll have time). The good thing about network home dirs and central file servers is that backups are a cinch and folks can move from win machine to win machine and retain profiles, etc.
When I analyze traffic, I pretty much see most of the boxen accessing the Sun and Linux systems since they are the main storage beasts and one has the MP3's *:^)
One very nice thing about SMB is that it is easily tunneled via SSH, so you can access your shares - securely - from almost anywhere you can ssh port tunnel to/from (it's cake on linux and try the ssh client from netsarang.com to do the same - as easily - under M$...or just install cygwin).
I have to agree with one of the other posts: the Mac is just amazing when it comes to file sharing compatibility and speed (SMB shares map very fast and it handles NFS as a good BSD box should).
hope this helps.
Give Samba a chance (Score:3, Insightful)
I briefly considered changing protocols to reflect the absence of Windows on the network but then thought, why bother? Samba does the job well, so why change it? OS X has Samba support built-in so it's extremely easy to mount shares on the Macs, and because we use the same account names on our laptops as we do on the file server, authentication is automatic, making the whole thing almost seamless (I say almost because OS X is still lacking good network browsing capabilities, but we should have that in 10.3).
You must give in (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You must give in (Score:2)
OS 8.6 did bomb out now and again, but with 9 and 9.1,things are *solid* (we run about 100 gig of traffic a day through these machines). Throughput makes MacOS file servers look *stupid*.
What's wrong with NFS? (Score:2)
I'm curious as to why the story author thinks that NFS is so difficult and complicated. As I see it, from the set of systems he's listed, the only OS that should give him any trouble here would be Windows, simply because it doesn't have NFS built-in.
Here I'm running four systems -- three Intel boxes running Linux, Linux, and OS/2, and a mipsel (PS2) running Linux.
When I started setting these systems up on my network, I went through a similar investigation to interconnect all the systems for file sharing.
Re:What's wrong with NFS? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with NFS? (Score:2)
Not to put words in the poster's mouth, but the reason many people find NFS to be somewhat complex is that the protocol requires user and group ids to be synchronized between the client and the server. If you're talking about two Unix systems, this generally means running NIS, NIS+, or LDAP, each of which is more complex than a standalone /etc/passwd file.
Nonsense I say! :). You don't need to run any extra special services like this for a small home installation -- just make sure that if a user exists o
Re:What's wrong with NFS? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with NFS? (Score:1)
There was some exploit related to spoofing your DNS then taking over the NFS share. I know guys that lost machines that way a few years back, so it may be a thing of the past.
I try to keep only 22 (ssh) open unless I have a samba server running, and then I still try to filter out uknown / untrusted IPs.
nmap is your friend to see where you have your pants down.
Re:What's wrong with NFS? (Score:1)
As soon as you nfs export something, you're trusting whatever ip / hostname you're exporting to always represent its UID truthfully, and this can be fudged a number of ways.
Depending on whatever access you allow in the first place, you will allow up to that much at any UID the h4x0R at the client end wants to use.
NFS requires complete (read: including physical) network security.
FTP vs AppleTalk (Score:2, Informative)
HTTP (Score:2)
I often transfer files to a friend's OS9 Mac from my Linux laptop using HTTP. File transfers the other way are a pain, though I could install netatalk on my laptop or put a simple webserver or ftp server on his machine I suppose. Actually Python has a standard modules for serving http so if I installed Python I could knock up a simple little server, throw in a bit of CGI magic and
NFS isn't complex. :-) (Score:2)
Add a single entry to
Voila!
NFS and Samba (Score:1)
NFS is not that complex. Edit the exports file, restart mountd, and mount it on the client machine.
Samba is pretty simple to set up through SWAT.
NFS? (Score:2)
NFS and automount: MacOS X knows NFS V3 protocoll (client and server-site implementation, no lockd/statd NFS locking). The automounter has only minor functionality: only direct maps are supported (makes it difficult to implement SEPP).
Win 98/XP
DiskAccess Windows NFS Client [simtel.net]
Linux should be obvious.
More importantly, how to share login/password info (Score:1)
Re:More importantly, how to share login/password i (Score:1)
Re:More importantly, how to share login/password i (Score:2)
Pretty much everything (except the MS boxes) will talk to LDAP these days, and MS boxes will talk to Active Directory, which is close enough to real LDAPv3. We use Novell's eDirectory w/PwdSync modules to sync into AD, and then everything else (AIX, Linux, Lotus stuff, Nortel stuff, etc...) talks directly to it. OpenLDAP is another choice, but I don't know if anyone's sorted out the password sync issues between OpenLDAP and AD.
Windows makes everything difficult. (Score:1)
Use NFS for the systems that count and Samba for the systems that don't. I don't know about Mac OS 9, but, of course, there's always FTP.
How about GUI sharing? (Score:2)
Re:How about GUI sharing? (Score:2)
Re:How about GUI sharing? (Score:2)
Uh, Konqueror, Windows Explorer (Score:2)
Andrew Filesystem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Andrew Filesystem (Score:2)
Just setup one (or a pair if you must) good server (Score:2)
SMB is not a bad protocol really, and Linux and BSD both do quite well running it as a server. Solaris, not so much, it's (Solaris') multi-thread preference means that the multi-process samba doesn't run so fast on it for large number
Hell, that's nothing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that's where the challenge lies. However, even today, kids have it easy: Provided the thing has a serial port and you can code to it, there are small serial-to-ethernet "converters" available (most of them consist of some form of microcontroller acting as a "go-between" from the ethernet interface and the serial port).
I remember one time in the early 1990's when I picked up a Compaq SLT/386 with 6 meg of RAM, running Caldera's OpenDOS (IIRC). No PCMCIA slots - only a serial port and a parallel port. Since network equipment was still fairly expensive (especially those lovely pocket parallel ethernet adaptors), I looked for a solution.
I ended up creating a funky bit-banging parallel port solution using 4 conductor phone line, dual jack adaptors, and custom wired parallel to RJ-11 plugs. I intended to write software to allow all computers on this network to transmit/receive on it - checking for the status of the lines to avoid colisions, random wait times when there was a busy, etc - I was looking to get 9600 baud on this thing. I managed to build enough dongles for three machines, but I never got around to the coding portion. Always wondered how well (if at all) it would have worked...
My setup (Score:3, Interesting)
Initially, since Windows didn't support NFS, I installed Samba and used SMB shares on everything. I found that the file transfers between my Mac and the Linux box were painfully slow (Red Hat 7.1). So I switched that connection to NFS. Its not as bad as it initially seemed to setup. The performance gain was amazing and everyone is chugging away.
FTP is okay, but if you want a mounted disk for say digital camera images or ripped audio collections NFS and SMB give you that ability with a cleaner interface.
Don't forget once you get this protocol thing all worked out. If you try to sling 600Megs of MP3's around your WiFi network, its going to take some time still. You might consider getting a nice 10/100 hub or switch if your moving large volumes of files each time you do it.
Lastly, there are lots of other great ways to move one or two small files around. scp, ftp, http (like you have done), email, and sneaker net.
Samba (Score:2)
It came down to Samba for us. We're using Linux as our web server, MacOS X as the design/development platform, and, incidentally, most of our division is Windows 2000. So, we are definitely not giving in to the dark side... When Active Directory goes down in flames, our main web site will be the only one still running ;^)
There are, however, a couple issues we haven't worked out yet on Samba permissions, but overall it's pretty usable.
WebDAV (Score:2)
Have a look at OpenAFS (Score:1, Informative)
The Obvious(?) Answer: P2P (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, for an ostensibly geeky audience, this one should have been near the top of the list of responses.
Re:The Obvious(?) Answer: P2P (Score:1)
CVS works for source code! Samba for mp3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Latex files are also easy to commit to CVS and even PDF files (don't forget to use the -kb parameters when adding!)
For mp3s I simply use Samba - of cour
Horses for courses (as they say) (Score:1)
My network has FreeBSD, RH Linux, OpenBSD, BeOS , NT and 2K. By running this configuration for some time I've learned the following that I think is relevant.
You don't need or want to share everything across all platforms. My kids XBoing scores are not relevant to BeOS or Windows for example. Whereas I need to view my invoices in all but BeOS. My mail is held in Netscape under Windows and Mozilla elsewhere. The files are almost the same but not exactly, making it unwise to keep copying them.
You need
Two problems to solve really (Score:3, Insightful)
The second problem is one of synchronization. This comes in to play mostly on laptops that will travel in and out of your network and may join other networks as well. The sorts of things you are likely wanting to synchronize are things like book marks, address books, some working files, etc. Synchronization has the addition complication that for some platforms some synchronized data may need to be imported/transformed to suit the local applications on that platform. The solution to this is much tougher i think. Some possible options are:
Personaly i'd love to see more work being done in these later areas. It would be nice to use mozilla anywhere and always have the same set of bookmarks synchronized and managed behind the scenes. It's kind of surprising that no one has really tackled this issue.
William Shatner Look At What You've Done (Score:2, Funny)
NFS is hard? (Score:3, Interesting)
echo "/leethaxor/music *(ro)" >>
exportfs -a
On the client:
mount haxor:/leethaxor/music
Was that so hard? Should work for linux and OSx unless OSX sucks. I'm sure there's graphical interfaces for Win32 and OS9.
Like this... (Score:1)
OpenAFS (Score:1)
Doesn't work in Mac OS 9. Use netatalk for a while and then consider upgrading your machines.
Communication (Score:1)
Huh? (Score:2)
What's WRONG with Samba? (Score:1)
That said, I am in a similar situation at work, but have no problems. My primary workstation is win2k, and my secondary one is OS X or OS 9 depending on where i'm booting any moment, and over there *points* is a red hat (blah) box. I have no difficu
my setup (Score:1)
Unison (Score:2)
Protocol (Score:1)
Close-proximity talking (Score:1)
Samba and Dave (Score:1)
Everybody's happy, everybody's talking, the old POS WinMe machine in the livingroom is playing MP3s coming from my L