On 8/17/16 5:14 PM, Richard Owlett wrote:
On 8/17/2016 10:34 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:On 8/17/16 11:09 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 09:45:39AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:I wish to connect two laptops via Ethernet. The Debian machine is having various configurations of Jessie installed. Consider it a laboratory experiment. It can have multiple installs in a day. It intentionally has *NO* internet connectivity. It has a small partition set aside for preseed.cfg and miscellaneous scripts. The second machine is running WinXP Pro SP3 and serves as source of preseed and script files. My internet searches turn up too much outdated information and/or fine detail. Most link assume a server with multiple clients. Better description would be a peer to peer setup. It may be convenient to have the Windows machine act as a terminal for the Debian machine.If you're connecting the two machines with a single cable, then either the cable needs to be a "cross-over" ethernet cable, or one or other other the devices needs to support "Auto-MDI/MDIX". Support for that was patchy in 10M/100M devices but it mich more common in Gigabit Ethernet devices.Or you could just plug both machines into a cheap ethernet hub.I did purchase an "8-Port Gigabit Switch". I don't intend open the shrink wrap unless convinced there is no other way. As I've said elsewhere a major motivation is educational.
Ok - then one thing to educate yourself on is details of the NICs in each machine - some will need a crossover cable to work, others will auto-detect.
Once you've got the physical layer sorted (that is, green blinky lights on both machines), then the rest of the configuration should be much the same as any network: * Either give the hosts unique, static IPs OR Run a DHCP server on one of the machines * Either refer to the hosts by IP address OR Run a DNS server on one of the machines OR Write the hostnames in /etc/hosts (%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows)If you're continually rebuilding the Debian machine, you probably don't want to fool with peer-to-peer setups. Probably better just to enable the ftp server already built into Win XP.Do I really want an "ftp server"? I can see the WinXP machine as a "server". Do I have problems with definitions?
Something has to talk, something has to listen and respond. Even in a peer-to-peer setup, there has to be a process listening and responding to incoming packets. Whether you call it a process or a server - something has to be running.
Now, if all you want to do is bounce packets off a machine, all it has to do is respond to "ping" - that's generally part of IP processing (if configured to respond).
If you want to do anything useful, you have to have something listening for incoming packets, connection requests, and transactions. That could be a telnet daemon (gives you a shell prompt when you connect), ftp (if you want to move files around), ssh (shell, plus some more interesting things), a web server, or lots of other things.
The question is what do you want to communicate. Usually it's files, hence enabling the WinXP ftp server is a good first step. Particularly if you're thinking of using that box as a source of files when you're building and rebuilding your Debian box - generally, Debian retrieves files via FTP.
Another thing to do is install PuTTY on the WinXP box as a telnet/ssh client.I've seen terms PuTTY and telnet before - will have to use them as search terms.Why would I be interested in ssh as both machines are sitting on my desk and _neither_ will be connected to the internet when ethernet connection is live?
Good point. SSH does some additional things like remote command execution. -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra