Sunday, November 4, 2012

Finally, Linux

Well, after nine days of Linux networking hell experiments, I finally got all my shared folders on Linux Mint 13 64-bit Mate showing up on my Windows network. I can tell you the solution involved not just one configuration file, but about five or six, and I had help from several different web sites and tutorials, and not any one of them proved to be the cure-all, although it's true I was branching out and doing other things I learned along the way to optimize my system, like replacing LABELS for my partitions with UUIDs in fstab, which helps to avoid problems when connecting new drives, and specifying "noatime" on each partition to stop Linux from keeping track of file accesses.

The last remaining obstacle that caused me much grief was that in Linux, setting permissions for a directory is not enough, not by a long shot. You must also check the permissions of the directory that that directory is stored in. When I set up the parent directory's permissions to permit access by others, that's when things turned around, like presto. Until then, I was very confused indeed.

It sure would be nice if there were some kind of auto-config utility that would walk users through the process of setting up a simple home network. I don't know why it has to be such an arduous process in 2012. There are things I could be learning about that would be of greater advantage than this, because nobody hires network admins without years of corporate experience, so my experience here is useless to anyone but myself. Be that as it may, I'm done.

Despite all my belly-aching I'm sticking with Linux Mint as long as she works, for the important reason I've already invested a boatload of time getting things set up and there's no way I'm going through all that nonsense again. This blog functioned as a release valve for all the frustrations I had repairing my network after switching one box from Windows to Linux.

My next project, scheduled for a long time from now, is to backup the Linux box to ensure that even if the hard drive fails, I won't have to conduct further experiments and headaches learning exercises.
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by igor 04:20 4 replies by igor 09:32 0 comments

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