On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 17:43, Bob Proulx
<bob@proulx.com> wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >> Can I configure an FTP server locally, that would allow for easy
> >> connection via Windows Explorer, Konqueror, and Nautilus? I need the
> >> ability to transfer files in both directions. Thanks in advance for
> >> any ideas.
MS-Windows machines have an ftp client by default. So you could
initiate a connection using the ftp client on MS. But MS does not
include an ftp daemon and so without installing something like
Cygwin's ftp deamon it would be difficult to symetrically have
connection ability both ways. But you could investigate Cygwin if you
needed that capability. If you can restrict to just always connecting
from the MS client then you can copy files both ways from that
client without needing to install anything else on the simple MS
clients.
Also, if you have an Apache web server enabled then the clients can
pull files by http. That may be even simpler for your purpose than
using ftp. However that would be a one way copy only. Still might be
useful in that direction though. No encryption overhead from SSH. No
passwords. Just go. But you need to think about whether security is
required for those files or not.
I think that, using a crossover ethernet connection between the two computers, network encryption does not matter much, at least in this case :)
> Also, as there is no router involved, how would the the "other"
> machine connect to my machine? Will I need to install a DHCP server?
> Can I assign a name to my laptop, so that the other machine could just
> connect to that name?
Yes. If I were doing this I would install a DHCP server such as
dhcp3-server on my Debian machine and have it serve addressees for the
thin clients that are attached on the wire. Most simple MS client
machines are configured for DHCP and therefore they would be assigned
an address automatically at connection time and no reconfiguration of
them would be needed.
However on your "server" machine you would probably need or want to
reconfigure for this configuration on and off as you needed it. You
might have a script that swaps configuration files between your two
configurations. Because you wouldn't want a dhcp server running on
the wire if you were to plug into a wired network yourself for normal
use as that would probably produce two dhcp servers there! Don't
break someone else's network! But if you turn things on and off only
as needed then you should be okay.
Using dhcp would assign addresses. Use a private RFC1918 address
range such as 192.168.*.* and you can use the numbers to refer to your
server machine immediately. If you want to use a name then that is
more complicated. For that you would need to set up a DNS nameserver
on your machine that would serve that name to your dhcp clients. That
is certainly reasonable and relatively easy to do. You can use a
private domain name without needing to register it globally.
There are lot of strong opinions about the best nameserver software.
Personally I would install bind9 and then set up a zone for a private
domain. Configure dhcp to tell clients to use your server for the
nameserver. Seems like it should work fine.
> Thanks! I have been googling this all morning and I cannot believe
> that not many people have been in this situation before, it seems so
> commonplace.
I think most people are satisfied with sneakernet using hard media for
transfer. But don't let that stop you. :-)
Bob
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