Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Need help setting up my home network

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 1
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous template Next
    #1

    Need help setting up my home network

    I have two laptops with Kubuntu and both are conected to my 2WIRE gateway modem. I have internet access on both of them through the same connection, and i want to start sharing files amongst them.

    What do i need to do? I have read that NFS is a great protocol for file sharring. Should i go ahead with the installation? Do i need to install one server and one client?

    Also, how do i check the IP configuration for each of my machines? Will i need to assign a static internal IP on each machine manually? how do i do that?

    Thank you guys, i will appreciate all your help very very much.
    Tags: None
    • Top
    • Bottom
    #2
    Re: Need help setting up my home network

    If you don't have any windows systems nfs is probably the way to go. With windows you would want samba.

    In order to be able to get rid of the greyed out options(even as administrator) in the system settings/internet and network/sharing/file sharing tab I had to install nfs-common and nfs-user-server.

    typing ifconfig in a console window will give you info and ip addresses of the interfaces on your machine.

    It sounds as if your systems are already connecting correctly to the gateway 2wire modem/router. You shouldn't need to assign static addresses. Once you set up the above you should be able to right click directories in konqueror and, under properties, use the share tab and then choose configure file sharing.
    • Top
    • Bottom

    Comment

      #3
      Re: Need help setting up my home network

      i got NFS running opie. Thank you so much for your response, and for the very precise answers. they helped clarify a great deal what i was doing. I basically followed this tutorial: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ar01s03.html

      I did move my machines on static IPs though, but i don't know how that works..since they are internal shouldn't they only be static? Does the dhcp option apply to internal IPs?

      BTW can i export with NFS to an outside host, not in my lan?


      Thanks again for your help. 8)
      • Top
      • Bottom

      Comment

        #4
        Re: Need help setting up my home network

        Originally posted by bagatelles

        I did move my machines on static IPs though,
        Then I would leave it that way


        since they are internal shouldn't they only be static? Does the dhcp option apply to internal IPs?
        The point of having a dhcp server in the router is to dynamically hand out the internal ips. The wan ip that is exposed to the net is given out by your isp.  Generally you only need to set up static addresses when you are opening ports in the router to allow inbound connections from the net to an internal machine functioning as a server. This is so that you don't run the risk of having the dhcp server handing the serving machine a different address and breaking the router's port mapping. With  local sharing this shouldn't really be much of a problem. I would just set up temporary shares, as needed, through the kde interface.
        At any rate, on a simple home network of a few machines it isn't likely that the machine ip will change.  Since you have already set up static addresses though I would just leave it alone.

        "BTW can i export with NFS to an outside host, not in my lan? "
        I'm not really competent enough with nfs to want to answer this, but yes you can export to the entire internet.  NFS can be a common vector for security problems so I would be careful unless very confident about my skills at securing my system if I was looking into exports like that or maybe you would want to use a vpn tunnel.  Since you are behind a router, the router should be refusing all inbound attempts from the internet by default.

        hopefully someone else will correct any errors I have made.


        • Top
        • Bottom

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Need help setting up my home network

          hmmm..interesting. thank you opie for being so specific.

          What i want to do is give access to some folders in my home partition, on the server, to some friends. Now i have that partition exported to my other laptop with NFS and i mount it from there, and that works fine so far. What i'm thinking is if i exclusively export to those members and myself and deny all other connections with NFS, would there still be security issues you think? btw, do you know what port i should forward to allow this type of file sharing?

          I have a lot of questions so i'm sorry if i sound too confused with all these things. Anyone feel free to offer his/her advice.

          Thanks again opie. I appreciate your help. 8)
          • Top
          • Bottom

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Need help setting up my home network

            nfs wasn't designed for wide area networking, but for lans.
            Any time you have a service exposed to the internet and poke holes in firewalls, those outside can exploit any weaknesses in the service.

            Give more info about the nature of these files.

            Are we talking about something like sharing photos with friends or is this some kind of sensitive personal information or are you wanting to do some kind of collaborative work where files change a lot and your friends are modifying files as well?

            Is this something that could be handled by using possible personal web space from your isp or sharing the files over something like myspace.com. This has the advantage of letting someone else worry about security issues and the files can be available at all times whether your system and network are up and running or not.
            • Top
            • Bottom

            Comment

              #7
              Re: Need help setting up my home network

              It's more of a collaborative work opie. We are a group working on a project and we need a common place to do upgrades, test the application..etc. Currently we are sending e-mails back and forth and i thought it would be a good idea to try something more sophisticated.

              I'm basically going to be exporting a folder with all the project's tools and with NFS everyone can do modifications freely. I've read about SSH and how it applies to nfs and i'm planning to implement that too. I also placed the project's files on a different partition, and i'm experimenting with access permissions as well. I'm worrying a bit too much cause i'm hosting a site on that computer too.

              Doesn't nfs block any other traffic except from what i specify in the '.allow' list?

              It's hard to try this on web-space cause we need a development environment to test the upgrades and modifications. The project is a jdbc application. If i can ensure some safety with NFS then it would be great i think. Is there anything safer or better you think?

              Thank you so much for your responses opie.
              • Top
              • Bottom

              Comment

                #8
                Re: Need help setting up my home network

                Sorry I can't be more help. I wanted to try to clarify some things for anyone that might be reading. I think you will need to get help from some networking security gurus. I don't know what all the ramifications of some of these choices are(another of which could be using rsync over ssh). I was hoping I could give you some ideas for further research.
                • Top
                • Bottom

                Comment

                  #9
                  Re: Need help setting up my home network

                  I'd suggest giving your friends ssh access to your machine, then letting them use sshfs (or using fish://user@host/ in konqueror) to make it seem like a shared filing system. That is easier than tunneling NFS over SSH, and secure too.
                  • Top
                  • Bottom

                  Comment

                    #10
                    Re: Need help setting up my home network

                    Opie your help was more than enough if anything, thank you very very much for your support. I will look into rsync and compare choices as well. 8)

                    About SSHFS, does someone have any readings to recommend? I know it is deadly easy to implement, but i have to compare cause i am very concerned about everything. Currently with NFS on my LAN i can only access with the client whatever the server exclusively specifies. I hope to implement something like that on a wan though. However opie is totally right there are some security issues and all the articles i've read the past few days talk about that..but don't really offer any strongly supported solution.

                    Thank you all for your help. I look forward to reading more comments and ideas from you guys.
                    • Top
                    • Bottom

                    Comment

                      #11
                      Re: Need help setting up my home network

                      sshfs will still only let people see files they have access to when ssh'd in to that machine, so you can use normal user/group permissions to define what they can read/write.

                      Read more about sshfs here: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html
                      • Top
                      • Bottom

                      Comment

                        #12
                        Re: Need help setting up my home network

                        Thanks marble. That approach doesn't seem to require much either. I'll test it thoroughly on my lan and possibly post my assumptions. thank you.

                        For anyone who is interested btw in any security measures for nfs, i did find a few articles that point out some weaknesses and how they can be tweaked. A bit too much to do in my opinion.

                        http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/117705/49/

                        http://www.samag.com/documents/s=407...d/sam0203d.htm
                        http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg03634.html (this is a conversation with the person who wrote the above article. The guy really points out some interesting issues)

                        http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ar01s06.html


                        Thanks a lot guys for all your help. Please feel free for any further advice. 8)
                        • Top
                        • Bottom

                        Comment

                        Previous template Next
                        Working...
                        X