Setting up a home network with WinXP

[Bryan Anderson]

Dennis Calhoun wrote:

> I've decided to hold off on upgrading to Fedora until it's next
> release, to allow time for any unexpected bugs to be fixed.

Well - an ex-Windows user here, with only a couple of weeks FC 
experience and it looks to me like if there are any bugs, they are 
minimal and don't interfere with day-to-day operation.

> In the meantime I've been trying to get Red Hat Linux 9 set up to
> serve a very small home network (only one other machine, running
> WinXP), with NO success.

I had a bit of a problem here - I have two PC's. Mine is still dual
boot XP/FC1 and my other, which is used mostly by kids and wife, is XP 
only. They, of course, want everything to work first time, every time 
and don't want to have to fiddle at all.

Originally I have two drives in my PC, 60GB for operating systems and
80GB for storage and this storage was shared and a drive mapped to it on 
the second PC.

Then I booted into FC1 and of course, the second PC couldn't see the 
data it was used to - no mp3's, movies, photos or anything. I couldn't 
see an obviou way to get XP to map drive D: to a windows share or to a 
linux share depending on how box one booted.

I solved the problem by taking the storage drive and putting it in the
XP box, and sharing that. Now the family always have access to all the
data no matter what OS I am using, and I can access it from both XP and
FC1. I did the same thing with the printers and plugged those both into
the XP box.

I found that doing it that way round made setting everything up VERY 
simple indeed. All I did was share the drive, made sure both machines 
were on the same workgroup, then went to smb://<ip address> and all the 
shares show up and can be mounted using /etc/fstab

Bryan Anderson <fedora at bryananderson.co.uk>