A few days ago I was working on making sure that smb file sharing was working correctly between 1 Windows xp pro, 1 Windows xp home, and two Ubuntu Linux machines. All was working fine, and all boxes could see the other ones. The I turned on the last Windows xp home box, and I lost everything. All 4 boxes that worked before could no longer see each other, but the box I just turned on could see everyone else. Rebooting the router did nothing to fix the problem. I then looked to the Windows xp home I just turned on and checked the sygate firewall. I found that it was set to block file sharing. Once I enabled it everything once again worked fine. I have no idea how that happen.
Yesterday I installed Slackware 10.2 on my practice server. I will be keeping TV shows on it to watch from other computers. I set up Samba with the KDE tools that were in Slackware. Nothing worked so I tried do it manually by editing the configuration files. Failing with that I then went about setting up SWAT, the Samba web configuration tool, and retried with that.Finally I could see the server and open one of the folders. The second one would not work no matter what. I finally changed the name and it worked fine. It seems you cannot name a Samba folder " share" even though I have always done that.
Thinking I was done I checked for the last time. I could not see the server or my laptop with my desktop. I then went to the Windows xp home box that cause the trouble and saw it was hibernating. I woke it up and could see the laptop and server again. I went back to the desktop, and all was well. Later I lost everything again. I went to the xp home box and saw it was hibernating. For some reason Samba client cannot see Samba severs if there isn't a windows box running on the network. I am totally confused but I found a workaround in which if I refresh three times to see anything in Ubuntu, nothing helps with Slackware, but I am going to run it headless anyway so I won't care about seeing anything.
I tried to use Samba to stream video files to the Laptop running Ubuntu Linux. The result was that I could only use Totem movie player and I got a choppy picture. I could not get Xine work with the Samba shares. I did not want to mount the Samba share because Windows networking is so flaky and I had lock ups from doing that before. I decided that NFS was what I needed. I used the KDE tool in Slackware to enable nfs sharing of the same folder I was sharing with Samba. I then went to mount the share to a folder I had created with.
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.2:/home/paul/download /home/paul
When I hit enter I suddenly lost my Gnome panels. I tried to restart them but that failed. I closed all windows then hit alt/ctrl/backspace to kill X. I then tried to re log in but Gnome failed to start. I hit alt/ctrl/F1 and logged in at the console to see what was up. I looked at my home file and saw nothing. I realized that I had remounted my home file as the empty NFS folder on the server when I left out the /download at the end of the command. I tried to unmount but it was busy. I didn't know about forcing umount with -l on the end. So I ended up rebooting to fix it. Now I know how to fix it if I make that mistake again.
I then added the NFS mounts to my fstab file. I had already added the sever name to me /etc/hosts with <servername> <server IP address>. Then I used this line added to /etc/fstab.
<servername>:<location of dir on server> <location of where to mount> nfs noauto,user,sync 0 0
This allows the computer to boot-up with out mounting the shares, then I can mount them using diskmounter when I want them. This will be especially necessary for the laptop which may always not be booted up near the network. If fstab was written normally it would take a long time to boot if the share could not be found.
Tested it on the laptop and I can now watch video files that exist on the server, streamed to the laptop, using Xine, and the picture is no longer choppy.
I finished the last few things on my Promaster-50 today. I mowed like a dream, I mowed everything that didn't move with ease. I don't have low range so I had to lower the engine speed in tight places and the engine kept it's speed fine. It took a bit to get used to taking tight corners with the steering brakes, but it was still much better than turning my C with the steering sulky. I was mowing fields and everything. I stopped after an hour, after cooling it down. Then a hour later started mowing the front lawn, I had to go slow because it is a mine field of trees. I was wearing ear plugs because the muffler decided to exit in a two places.
I was 3/4 finished with the front lawn when I heard a loud squealing, I shut everything down thinking I has seized a spindle in the deck. Everything looked fine so I started it back up, it ran fine for a minute so I got ready to mow again, when the squealing came back and ended with a bang, I jumped off the tractor to avoid shrapnel and watched as the engine continued to spin with the ignition off for 30 seconds with a knock at every revolution. When it stopped I tried to turn the engine by hand and it spun easily. I am guessing I broke a rod. I may have broke a piston but I doubt it. Since I start a new job on Tuesday I probably won't know for a long time. Needless to say I got very depressed.
I have found one bright spot, most of the money I put into it was for the deck and the deck will bolt onto my model C. That also means I will have to fix that mysterious " carburetor leaks gas only after it is shut down hot problem" but I might be able to deal with that using the gas shutoff valve I put in. One thing I know for sure is that a lot less grass will be mowed to keep the deer tics away once again. Looks like it is time to move.
I just found out yesterday the the MPAA was suing BitTorrent sites again, this time they are going after the ones that have TV shows. I have been using a site at http://www.btefnet.net/ and found out that the domain name has been taken. Then today their trackers went down. I have been downloading StarTrek Enterprise when my local affiliate decided baseball was better, and to get the new Dr. Who, which is seems is not available on in America. Now that the trackers are down I get to test my BitTorrent clients Azureus, and see if there new system of clients finding each other without a tracker works, and it does. So I will continue to seed the last 4 Dr. Who episodes that I downloaded until there are no more peers, in defiance of the MPAA of course.
I am also going to try to see the movie the movie the Hitchhikers Guild to the Galaxy. That will probably be my last movie for a good long time. I will try to catch good movies on TV and ignore the commercials in defiance.
For a long time I have been using BitTorrent with out being able to accept connections from other users. This has the effect of limiting who you can download and upload too and can slow you over all download speed. I fought for a long time trying to port forward ports 6881-6889 to my computer through a Linksys wireless B router. After it had died, my wife wanted to buy another one, so I told her " anything but Linksys". Of course when she got home it was a Linksys wireless G router. I started right in on port forwarding and failed. So I tried using the DMZ (DeMilitarised Zone) setting which of course did nothing but let junk from owned Windows boxes hit my firewall. I finally decided after reading and Googleing and coming up with nothing to actually talk to Linksys. I tried their Java chat, rather than use the phone to talk to someone from Delhi. When the chat failed to work twice, I decided to read some more. I found on the Linksys site that a certain game needed port triggering instead of port forwarding to work. I tried that and triggered the ports to the same value, and nothing, it still didn't work. The I tried port forwarding and port triggering at the same time, and bingo, I finally got the green smiley on my BitTorrent client I had been looking for. I have no idea why port forwarding or DMZ did not work, but I am happy that I now have faster BitTorrent downloads. I hope this helps someone else some days, as I haven't found a place to share this with on the net.
My first blog entry and my head hurts to badly to write anything meaningful.I hope to be writing here really soon.