Home setup

[seabird]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to rethink my home setup including my server. Currently there are 4 main components in my house:

-My laptop (F17) (I travel alot)
-My desktop (W7)
-My Server (F16)
-My mediaplayer

My server serves the purpose of centralised storage/backup and as mail server. Since I am sick and tired of syncing all my machines I want to have a setup that makes my W7 machine use my centralized storage as 'local'. Right now it uses SMB and that doesn't do the trick as windows won't store documents on networked drives.

My laptop should sync documents whenever it has internet. and my mediaplayer uses SMB right now to access movies etc.

Any ideas on what the ideal setup would be?

Jacco

[sea]

If you want your desktop to take a server role, why using a server as well?
Especialy since you have a media server, which can store documents just as well.

[seabird]

No, I don't want my desktop to work as my server, but want to trick my desktop into thinking that my server storage is local storage. Meaning all files edited etc are directly on the server.

[gurutech]

You would need to configure the server to have 777 permissions on whichever folders you need to be able to write to, and then configure Win7 to use that folder as part of the "Documents Library".

[6e617a696d]

Since purpose of server is just backup, why not to use proper backup solution? If you still pushing toward

"local" disk

You should read a little bit about FoE and iSCSI.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by seabird

Hi everyone,

I am trying to rethink my home setup including my server. Currently there are 4 main components in my house:

-My laptop (F17) (I travel alot)
-My desktop (W7)
-My Server (F16)
-My mediaplayer

My server serves the purpose of centralised storage/backup and as mail server. Since I am sick and tired of syncing all my machines I want to have a setup that makes my W7 machine use my centralized storage as 'local'. Right now it uses SMB and that doesn't do the trick as windows won't store documents on networked drives.

My laptop should sync documents whenever it has internet. and my mediaplayer uses SMB right now to access movies etc.

Any ideas on what the ideal setup would be?

Jacco

I have a few comments.

I would not implement any mailserver that doesn't serve IMAP, POPn is silly. I happen to use postfix,dovecot but there are lots of good choices in Linux. The big headache with a mail server on fedora is that the version changes, the config files change and ... you have to either constantly update or else you need to stick with a distro that doesn't change. 6 months ago I put my mail-server on a KVM virtualization running scientific-Linux (but Centos is good too) and this neatly solves the problem. This way I can update the server and so long as the KVMs remain up, I have no admin tasks to worry about.

WRT storage ....

You should read a little bit about FoE and iSCSI.

Don't know FoE, perhaps he means AoE, but iSCSI merely presents some block device (partition for example) to another system across the net. You cannot share files or mount the filesys on that block device twice. So yes it might appear local, but it's not able to share. Yo u*might* be able to mount al lbut one read-only but that sort of defeats the purpose.

What you want is a shared filesystems to span Linux&Windows. The likely options are SAMBA/smb, NFS (supported now on recent windows releases), your *may* be able to use sftp with some tools file filezilla for some applications, and someday the Windows FUSE api will support gluster.
==========

windows won't store documents on networked drives.

Just to reiterate the obvious. This is 100% a Windoze problem. For whatever reason they are locking you out from controlling your system as you see fit. You should be quite angry at Redmond for doing this. Maybe there is a feature to permit this.

I only mention this b/c some Linux beginners automatically blame Linux for not being 100% compatible with Win. Lin isn't perfect, but 90% of the time the problem is that Redmond is doing something rude.

==========


Hey N'
echo "obase=16;ibase=2;01010011 01101001 01101110 01100011 01100101 01110010 01100101 01101100 01111001 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011 00100000 01001110 01100001 01111010 01101001 01101101 00100000 001000001 0101110" | tr ' ' ';' | bc | sed 's/../\\\\x&/g' | tr -d '\n' | xargs printf ; echo ""

[seabird]

OK, thank you all for the feedback.

@Stevea: Thank you for the extended explination. I may give NFS a try. I am already running postfix but I opted for Zarafa instead of dovecot.

I understand most things are on the windows side, that why I was hoping my Linux was smart enough to outtrick them

[sea]

Once your server/nas drives are mounted to your desktop, you should be able to handle those files as if they were local.

Me have a file for that: $HOME/bin/mnt-nas

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.yyy.xxx/Public /mnt/Public -o credentials=/etc/nas.cred
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.yyy.xxx/priv /home/simon/.hidden -o credentials=/etc/nas.cred

Hope this helps

[markie83]

the easiest way for your W7 box to use the server as local storage is to use samba and a simple batchfile at startup.

place this in your smb.conf on the server

[sharename]
path = /home/username/sharefolder
browseable = yes
comment = share
writable = yes
public = yes
guest ok = yes

***also be sure to have your workgroup set to the same as your W7 box

**** also run
#smbpasswd -a username


then create a batchfile that executes at startup on your W7 box

ping ip.address.of.server
if exist X: net use X: /delete
net use X: \\ip.address.of.server\sharename password /user:username /persistent:y

I use the ping in the batch file to delay the mount attempt until windows gets the network up....add more lines of ping if you need more delay......also use the IP of therver NOT the hostname. Windows filesharing is TERRIBLE when using the hostname. This batch file will mount the samba shared folder as drive letter X: in windows.

good luck