Re: tlug: newbie...well, potential newbie

[Jason Molenda <crash@example.com>]

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tlug note from Jason Molenda <crash@example.com>
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Hi Tim,

I'll try to answer three of your questions as a starting point:

  1.  Got macs, got PCs, want to make it all work on a single
      leased line.

I think O'Reilly and Associates has a book about this stuff ("Getting
Jacked In to the 'net" or something :-).  If you don't already have
one, you'll need some networking hardware.  My setup here in my office
is a Cisco 2516 Router+10BaseT Hub, a Fujitsu CSU/DSU thing, and some
NTT leased line doohickey which I think NTT provided.  I have a 56k
link to GOL.  The Cisco wasn't cheap, but it's pretty slick.

Your ISP should be able to help you with this stuff.  There is probably
some way to use a Unix box as the router part--you'd have to interface
to the CSU/DSU somehow; maybe if you could get an internal ISDN card
you could do that.  The Unix box would receive packets from the WAN
connection and send them out to the other hosts on your network--the
other hosts on your network will send packets destined for the Internet
to your Unix box.  I believe Linux is capable of all of this and lots
of folks do it.

  2. Could a single Unix host do mail+www+dns+share files?

No problem, especially a recent piece of hardware.  I do all of this
with a SPARCstation 5 running Solaris as my main host--CPU wise, the
SS5 is about as fast as a 100MHz Pentium system.  So any PC is going to
have CPU cycles to spare doing this stuff unless you become the Yahoo
of Japan and have billions of hits on your WWW server or the like.


  3. I want to share files between all my systems

I have no recent experience with this, but for sharing with your
Win95/NT systems, you can use samba, some free software maintained in
Australia that allows you to mount filesystems back and forth via
Microsoft's SMB protocol.  (SMB is similar to NFS)

For your Macs, there is a package called "CAP", Columbia Appletalk
Package, which is intended to share things between Unix systems and
Macs.  I haven't touched this in over 7 years, but I think it still
exists and still works.  I remember that I didn't enjoy configuring it,
but what you gonna do.

Using both of these may allow you to have a single filesystem available
on all three platforms.  Cross your fingers.


A couple of comments:  


   If you're getting a 128k line, you're going to be paying some bucks
   to your ISP.  They have a lot of knowledge--take advantage of it.

   Linux will work fine in an office situation like yours; the only
   problem I've ever seen in highly networked LAN situations is that
   its NFS performance is not hugely great.  This hit the main office
   for my company in California with our Linux hosts, but we've got
   like 60-70 Unix systems with everything mounted all over the place
   and other nastinesses.

   Solaris also works fine.  I use Solaris every day and it is the server
   for everything at cygnus.co.jp.  In fact, this is the only Unix system
   that I keep running Unix full-time (the rest are PCs with Win95/NT/Linux
   that I switch around).

   One cool thing about the Linux distributions is that they come with
   every possible piece of free software you could want already loaded
   (except maybe really nasty hacks like perl/tk :-) :-).  If you buy
   something like the Redhat distribution (www.redhat.com), the
   installer generally works without too much pain, and when it's
   finished, you've got a really well-rounded system.  When I buy a new
   Solaris system, I spend a week or two tracking down the free software
   on which I've come to depend, figuring out the configuration, and 
   installing all of it.  Yuck.  Redhat gets huge bonus points on this
   count.  Plus, when a new distribution comes out, you load that on
   your system and a lot of this other software is also upgraded.

   Redhat isn't the only game in town, there are also slackware, Debian,
   Yygrassil (sp), and probably a couple of others that I don't know about.

   

> I have heard that linux can be a real bear to set up, configure,
> maintain.  What's the call here, how tough is it, really, in the current
> state of things?  Are the rewards worth whatever hassles are involved? 

There can be some technical bits.  It is helpful to know people who are
familiar with Linux to ask for help.  The TLUG folks are all pretty
helpful.


Jason
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