Snow Day! (or My Adventure with Fedora)

The Blizzard of 2007 has started, so the family and I are all home today. Since I've been having zero luck with Ubuntu, I'm trying Fedora 6. Not a bad project to relieve cabin fever.

After seeing that this would be a 5 CD download and burn, I decided to try the network install instead. The first step was to find the elusive boot.iso - a less than 8MB CD image that will boot the system and pull the files from a mirror. This is located in the /os/images sub folder. I burned this and booted. I used the command linux text askmethod to force a text based install and to get the chance to enter the mirror info. It took a few tries to get the mirror definition correct (the path name must go all the way out to the /os/ folder). I answered a bunch of questions, including what software to install. I chose Windows File Server, editors, and a few others. No graphical or window manager stuff. It only took about half an hour.

After rebooting, it came up with a system agent. I unchecked sendmail from the startup list, added smb, but left the rest as is (I think I'll have to do a bunch of research to fine tune the box, but this will work for now).

I added myself as a user, and then looked around for instructions to setup a static IP. I found that the information is stored in /etc/sysconfg/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. I commented the line BOOTPROTO=dhcp and added:

BOOTPROTO= static
BROADCAST=192.168.254.254 (is this the gateway?)
IPADDR=192.168.254.1
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.254.0 (not sure what this is)

These commands stop and start the interface:
/sbin/ifdown eth0
/sbin/ifup eth0

I received an error saying that the IP address was already in use by another host, but I wasn't able to PING it from another machine. I changed it to .2 for now; I'll work on that later.

SSHD is already installed an running, so I was able to log in via PuTTY. The SSHD configuration file is /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and I modified it as outlined earlier.

The Samba configuration file smb.conf is located in /etc/samba/. I pasted in the same config file listed here, except I changed 'Ubuntu' to 'Fedora'. Continuing with the instructions on that page, I created the /export directory, and restarted Samba (using the first restart command listed).

And then, it gets difficult. When I browse the network from my Windows client, I can see the server and attempt to open it. After a long pause, I'm told that I don't have access to it, and the icon disappears from the workgroup devices list. Nothing short of a reboot of the server will bring it back (at least, nothing I know about). Restarting Samba doesn't help.

Well, the day is over, and I'm tired, so I'm putting this little experiment to bed (after about 12 hours of playing around). The most frustrating part has been relearning 'Linux'. I know that most of Linux is actually other software that runs on the kernel, but it can be tough when different distros store files in different places and configure things different ways.