Building a file server, wanting to use linux, but am kinda new at it.

[rahvin]

If you want to web configure Samba, don't use webmin (ick) use SWAT. It's part of Samba.

 

[coolred]

Well assuming I understood drag correctly. He made it sound as though, Windows cannot see linux partitions(I knew this already). So he recommended that that I reformat all my drives to a linux file system. That would eb a huge pain really. And then I beleieve he also said that thw windows machines would pretty much only be able to read the files on the linux partitions, not write to them. If that is the case then its pointless for me really.

Maybe I misunderstood him, and if so I appologize to him for not retelling it correctly.

I want a system to store my files with full read/write capability for the other machines in my network. I can't imagine this isn't possible, but apparently I am confused on how to do it.

 

[nweaver]

I think you misunderstood.

If you put hardrive A (NTFS) into a linux box, it has READ access only, with expermental (aka bad) write support
If you put hardrive B (EXT3) into a windows box, you can get a read only driver that's a pain to use for it, no write.

If you put HDB (EXT3) in a linux box, it's native and fine. You install Samba, and then windows doesn't care what FS is on the other end of the wire.

 

[coolred]

Originally posted by: nweaver
I think you misunderstood.

If you put hardrive A (NTFS) into a linux box, it has READ access only, with expermental (aka bad) write support
If you put hardrive B (EXT3) into a windows box, you can get a read only driver that's a pain to use for it, no write.

If you put HDB (EXT3) in a linux box, it's native and fine. You install Samba, and then windows doesn't care what FS is on the other end of the wire.

Okay, I would be lookin gto do optiona A, putting a NTFS drive in a linux box. Since the linux OS would only have read access to it, does that mean also that any other computers(even windows based)would still only be read only as well, since it all has to go back through linux anyway?

I don't care as much if th elinux OS can write to thsose NTFS drives as much as I do, if the windows machines can write to those drives. But I am guessing that since linux can't write to them, that a windows box accessing them through linux probablly would also not be able towrite to them. I got 5 hard drives in this box, 1 I plan to use as the OS drive, the others all already have data from previous use in a windows box. For the most part they all should be NTFS, but I think one of them may have been FAT32.


I am also little worried about how well I will retain any info I learn from using linux. I mean if i only have to go through and set it up, or do soemthing to it once. I may not remember how to do that again 6 months down the road when I may need to do it again.

 

[skyking]

your assumption is right. the filesystems running on another computer have nothing to do with the operating system of your computer. the machine with the drives in it does all the work, and the rest is network protocol.
If you have an NTFS drive loaded with data and you wish to read/write to it, you have a few options:
1) mount that drive in a windows NT/2K/XP box. Done.
2)build a samba box, mount the drive in it and move the data to another drive. tedious but effective.
3) a blend of the two. put that drive in your main comp, and move/organize your data over time to the network fileserver.

Regarding retention of the skills: unless you have a hardware failure, you won't be rebuilding this thing anytime soon

 

[nweaver]

one advantage to Linux is LVM/Software raid, both of which have webmin modules (not sure how well they work, I do it all via command line/config file)

 

[DaiShan]

I recommend Gentoo, Ubuntu is extremely easy to set up, but Gentoo has fantastic documentation and a great support community. gentoo-wiki.org will walk you through (explicitly) installing and configuring SAMBA to do whatever you like, and the Gentoo install docs (available on their site at gentoo.org) are an explicit step by step instruction manual for installing Gentoo base system. Plus Gentoo has portage

 

[DaiShan]

Originally posted by: Robor
Is webmin installed on the samba server or is it something that would be installed on a client accessing the server? If so, will it work in Fedora Core 4?

Heh in Gentoo you type "emerge webmin" and it downloads and installs for you It's nice for beginners, but if you think that you'll be doing a lot of work with linux in the future, take the time to familiarize yourself with the CLI and editing .confs.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I can't believe people still use webmin. barf.

 

[coolred]

Alright, so what would be the easiest way to transfer my data from the NTFS partitions over to linux partitions. I have a new empty 300GB drive, 2x250GB drives , 1 80GB drive, and 1 36GB drive. All but the 300GB drive have data on them. Some are full, some may not be completely full.

 

[coolred]

any help

 

[skyking]

I would suggest installing whatever distribution you like on the 300 Gb drive.
Install and configure samba, get the box up and running on your network.
Create a /nt folder in /usr

cd /usr
mkdir nt

Next, shut down and install one of the other drives, and reboot.
Watch the boot on the monitor, and you'll see the second drive get probed. it will show up as ad1 or ad2. make a note of that for the next step.


Let's say it probed as ad1.



mount that drive on the filesytem like this:
mount_ntfs /dev/ad1 /usr/nt

If that goes OK, then

cd /usr/nt

ls

<there is your stuff>

Now you can copy the contents out of there into the 300GB drive.

man cp for the details of that.

after you get the hang of that, you can reformat the emptied drive to suit the distro or unix of your choice, and permanently mount the drive using /etc/fstab or wherever your distro does it.

Because of the way filesystems are mounted, there are no drive letters.

For example, if one of those 250's were to be for foreign films, you could

mkdir foreign_films

and mount it there.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: coolred
Alright, so what would be the easiest way to transfer my data from the NTFS partitions over to linux partitions.

I wouldn't bother with that to start with. Just take the empty 300G drive and figure out how to get Linux installed and Samba running correctly. Chances are good that you'll end up trying a couple of times to get things set up to your satisfaction, and you don't need to be copying half a terabyte of data just to figure that out. Once you have everything configured properly, make copies of smb.conf and any other key config files and then you can reinstall "for real" and take care of your data copying issues then.