How would someone go about setting up a windows XP Pro computer on a server which runs on Linux? Basically the XP computer just needs to connect to a network printer and access files available to other computers on the network.
I have no experience on linux machines so a dummy’s walkthrough of the networking would be great.
Could you clarifiy a some points?
thank you!
You’re looking for Samba.
It’s a file/print sharing service on Linux that emulates NT4 (and to some degree, Active Directory) domains. Set up Samba, join the Windows box to the domain, and voila.
If that’s beyond your skillset at the moment, you may want to look in to running an ftp/sftp server on the Linux box and connecting with a client, and setting up IPP on the Linux box via CUPS so that you can connect to the printer via a URL rather than via the Samba layer.
Wait: looking at your second post more closely, it appears that you’re not the network administrator in this situation, so you probably don’t have rights to make the necessary configuration changes.
If the folders are indeed set up directly on the XP machines and there’s no domain authentication going on through the Linux box - ie, the Linux box is really just a print server - you should be able to get to them by entering //machine/sharename in the Explorer address bar.
If there is domain authentication going on, you’re going to need to get the sysadmin to give you an account.
This is true… the previous network admin left for another job and I got stuck in a position of setting up a new system on the network.
Any thoughts/ideas before I jump into this blindly?
What can you find out about the Linux server?
What OS is it running, and what services?
My suggestion would be to copy as much as you can from another working machine
Find out the WORKGROUP of the other Windows machines (right-click My Computer, select properties, and the Computer Name tab.)
If they have a DOMAIN setting (not a workgroup), you have more issues, as noted above.
Find out their Network interface settings, too - hopefully they will be DHCP
Set up your Windows PC to have the same WORKGROUP and Network Settings. If they have a set IP address (static IP) you need to set yours to one that no-one else is using. This can be a problem in a mid sized network.
Connect it to the network and reboot.
Once you have logged in, launch Network Neighbourhood - you will (hopefully) be able to browse the network and see the shares you want (right-click Map Drive). If you can’t connect (due to permissions), you need to ask the person who owns the share (ie the person who’s machine shares the files) to add your user id to the permissions list. This may not be needed if the shared are open to everybody. This needs to be done for every different machine you connect to.
Otherwise, if you know the machine and share name, map a drive to \machine\sharename
If the Linux server needs a username/password, then you do need to be added in to that, and without more details, we probably can’t help.
Si
Yikes. Unless the previous admin left under a cloud, there ought to be some kind of handover documentation somewhere - detailing things such as login details for servers.
You absolutely need to track this down (or if it cannot be found, find out whether it is possible/appropriate to contact the previous admin and ask for it).
Even if it’s set up as a Workgroup and you can get the new machine to join without tinkering with the server, something will happen at some point in the future that will require full administrative access - and you really don’t want to be scrabbling around trying to find the root password then - it could be several years from now and the trail to the necessary information will have gone completely cold.