Author: Hongyu

Here are the three steps that I run VNC at my home.

1. Your Linux system might already have the software installed (type “which vncpasswd” to tell). If not, download the software from http://www.realvnc.com, and install it on your Linux and windows, respectively.

2. Launch from the server side (Linux)
$ vncpasswd
$ vncserver

3. Lanuch from the client (windows)
when prompted the server name, type linux_host_name:1, where linux_host_name is your linux box name and 1 is the port number for the vncserver, which could be a different port number sometime (you can tell it from the “vncserver” output at the previous step).

4. set kde

$ vi .vnc/xstartup

replace
twm &
with
startkde &

http://edonkey.com/downloads.php

1) Install command line rpm
2) Install gui rpm
3) Launch the proram: ed2k_gui

http://pkeck.myweb.uga.edu/ssh/

http://www.jdmz.net/ssh

1) make sure ssh and rsync are installed on both computers

2) at the visitor machine’s shell window, type the following command
$ cd /root/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 1024 -f visitor_machine_key

enter a BLANK passphrase

3) generate a file called “config” in the visitor machine under /root/.ssh/ with options like these
Host remote_host_machine
User root
Compression yes
Protocol 2
RSAAuthentication yes
StrictHostKeyChecking no
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes
IdentityFile /root/.ssh/visitor_machine_key

4) Copy the /root/.ssh/visitor_machine_key.pub file and paste the file in or
at the end of the remote host machine’s file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Linux side:

Started with the initial Samba configuration file /etc/samba/smb.conf, here are a few important lines that I modified or turned on:

workgroup = workgroup #change workgroup to my own home network name here

security = share # I need to include printer, and found security=user could add complexity to an occasional guest computers.

encrypt password = YES
samba password file =/etc/samba/smbpasswd

Then I add my username to my samba password file
$ smbpasswd -a myusername

Restart the samba daemon
$ /etc/init.d/smb restart

Turn off the firewall:
$ /etc/init.d/iptables stop

In fact, one just needs to open a few ports instead of turning off the entire firewall, but here is just a simple solution if the computers are safely isolated from the internet by a router.

windows side

Click “My Network Places” -> “Set up a home or small office network”, and a set up window will appear. Just go through the rest steps following the question in the window. An early mistake that I’ve ever made before is when it asked “Select the statement that best describe the computer”, I chose the first one, i.e., directly connect to the network. In fact, the correct one shoud be the second, i.e., the computer is connected to another computer or gateway in my case, because indeed my computer is connected to my wireless router, which effectively is a small computer.

Finally, clicking “My Network Places” will show the samba server. Clicking the server will prompt you a username and password, which is the username and password that you added in the previous Linux side step.

I was also trying to set up access of my Linux machine to the Windows machine, but found XP SP2 firewall is blocking access. So I didn’t bother to try more.

Here is the final set up (output of testparm)

# Global parameters
[global]
workgroup = HOLLYWOOD
server string = Samba Server
security = SHARE
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
max log size = 50
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
printcap name = /etc/printcap
dns proxy = No
idmap uid = 16777216-33554431
idmap gid = 16777216-33554431
cups options = raw

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
read only = No
browseable = No

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
guest ok = Yes
printable = Yes
browseable = No

In my home’s intranet, I need to connect to my linux server from my XP laptop. To directly use the linux computer’s name instead of the IP adress, I need to make sure that XP can correctly map the host name to the IP address. I have tried two options. The first is to modify the hosts file in windows, and the second is to directly modify the IP-hostname pair in the router’s DNS setup. And I prefer the second method.

The first method:
use Notepad to open the file “c:windows\system32\drivers\hosts”, or “c:windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts”
at NT, it’s c:winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and add the following line

192.168.1.4 beast

which mapped the IP address 192.168.1.4 to my linux machine “beast”. The following link is very useful to me, http://practice.chatserve.com/hosts.html

In order to set up the hostname on the linux box, I made a change on the /etc/hosts file, which looks like this:
127.0.0.1 beast.localdomain localhost beast
192.168.1.4 beast.localdomain localhost beast