[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: accessing network - newbie



Sandip P Deshmukh wrote:

 hello all!

after using windows for ages, i am planning to switch to linux. my compaq is already a dual boot machine running win98 and debian 3.0.

i am on a lan which also provides me access to the internet. i know my machine's ip address, gateway and dns addresses. i use d-link card for connecting to the lan.

i will like to have access to network resources (printers, etc) and the net. i tried my best but could not do much.

8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.24
eth0: D-Link DFE-538TX (RealTek RTL8139) at 0xc481a000, 00:50:ba:3c:c0:93, IRQ 11
eth0:  Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139C'

So the kernel is seeing your NIC; that's good.

What happens if you try to ping something?

What's the output of "ifconfig"? Here's an example of ifconfig's output on a networked computer:


eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:A0:CC:DA:98:4E inet addr:192.168.0.3 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:225645 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:197923 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:204979948 (195.4 MiB)  TX bytes:24149315 (23.0 MiB)
          Interrupt:5 Base address:0xd000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:86 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:86 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:5364 (5.2 KiB)  TX bytes:5364 (5.2 KiB)


It sounds like you're not using DHCP, but rather that you have a static IP address for your box. In either case, you'll find the appropriate place to set IP stuff to be /etc/network/interfaces (see "man interfaces"). An example might look like:

# Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
# /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.

auto lo eth0

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
     address 192.168.0.3
     netmask 255.255.255.0
     gateway 192.168.0.1

#iface eth0 inet dhcp

Then restart networking ("/etc/init.d/networking stop" followed by "/etc/init.d/networking start" ("restart" should work, but it's been my experience that it doesn't always restart networking properly)). You should now be able to ping other computers, use telnet, ssh, ftp, browse, etc.

Accessing network printers, computers, etc is a broader topic. From a later post you made it sound like you're wanting to validate users off of a Windows domain, which is a problem I've not been able to solve in three years. However, accessing files on those Windows machines and printers, etc, is relatively simple. Install smbfs and smbclient, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to point to the correct domain and DNS servers (being aware that there are some security issues here), then you can connect to Windows boxes using their native language of SMB. For example, if the "ShareMe" directory is being shared out to your user of "deshmukh" from the Windows computer named "BigServer", you can mount that share (kind of like mapping a drive) with the following:
   mkdir ~/BigShare
smbmount //bigserver/shareme /home/deshmukh/BigShare -o username=deshmukh and you'll be asked for your password, after which the contents of the shared directory will be in the ~/BigShare directory.

Hopefully this'll give you a start.

Kent




Reply to: