networking: Fedora/Mac OS X

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 6:32 am

okay, one machine, harvey, has Fedora 6, and the other machine, octopus, has Mac OS 10.4.

I have "switched on" samba, or windows networking or whatever it's called on both, using the various gui tools, as per various howtos.

Nothing. putting smb:/// into nautilus shows nothing on the network.

All i want to do is move files from one computer's hard drive to the other's. The howtos i have found are mainly for windows XP to one or other of Fedora or Mac OS X (apparently most people have windows XP for some reason), or they need some proprietary software to be installed. Surely none of that rubbish is needed.

ssh works fine from one to the other though i have to specify the IP addresses (both fixed) rather than the hostnames because for some reason i can't edit the /etc/hosts on the Mac. That's okay, i know what the IP addresses are, i just haven't a clue how to just get the files from one computer to the other and back again. Preferably i'd like to set up a nice file sharing thing with an icon that can be clicked when both machines are on to open a location on the other machine's hard drive etc but if i can just damn well copy the files using any method i'll be happy for now.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance and sorry for being so rotten at networking!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 8:17 am

I find it odd that you chose a network protocol that is not native to either OS. I would have used NFS if I were in your position.

I have never used OSX so I can't really do anything but provide links:

http://sial.org/howto/osx/automount
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... 228a3c4dad
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=30250

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:57 pm

thanks for the reply and the links.

the first decent looking howto i found was for OSX and Ubuntu. it advised using smb since it's easy to turn on in both OSs, and it looked easy to turn on in fedora too!

will check out links, i really didn't have an easy time googling for it myself.

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 12:29 pm

from http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/server.html
Second, it is a poor idea to export a FAT or VFAT (i.e., MS-DOS or Windows 95/98) filesystem with NFS. FAT is not designed for use on a multi-user machine, and as a result, operations that depend on permissions will not work well. Moreover, some of the underlying filesystem design is reported to work poorly with NFS's expectations.

Third, device or other special files may not export correctly to non-Linux clients. See Section 8 for details on particular operating systems.

i'm getting that sinking feeling... well, am reading up now, will see how i get on with nfs. I plan to replace the vfat filesystem with a ext3 one anyway once i can finally back its contents up somehow...

Copperhead · Post by **Copperhead** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 6:38 pm

To edit /etc/hosts on OS X you simply use sudo, just like you would in Linux/BSD:

Open a terminal:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

Enter in the admin's password.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:51 pm

If you can ssh from one box to the other and are using konqueror you can use the fish protocol from within the file browser (fish just being a graphical ssh session)
fish://user@192.168.x.x
and you can log into the other box, after that it's just a matter of drag & drop from one window to the other

don't know if there's a fish implementation for nautilus though

Master of Reality · Post by **Master of Reality** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 9:36 pm

Ice9 wrote:If you can ssh from one box to the other and are using konqueror you can use the fish protocol from within the file browser (fish just being a graphical ssh session)
fish://user@192.168.x.x
and you can log into the other box, after that it's just a matter of drag & drop from one window to the other

don't know if there's a fish implementation for nautilus though

or scp from commandline.

Actually i'm going to recommend the most extranuous option... use fuse to setup a filesystem mounted through ssh.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:48 am

Ice9 wrote:If you can ssh from one box to the other and are using konqueror you can use the fish protocol from within the file browser (fish just being a graphical ssh session)
fish://user@192.168.x.x
and you can log into the other box, after that it's just a matter of drag & drop from one window to the other

don't know if there's a fish implementation for nautilus though

In Nautilus you can just "sftp://hostname" (or sftp://user@hostname). Works great.

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:11 am

the laptop with OSX has actually died (or something to do with its power supply set up has died,
but replaced power supply and died again within a week) so i haven't been able to try any more
networking of the two. as i recall all i bothered to set up at the time was ftp in both directions
and ssh in one direction, just for slinging files back and forth. My router's died as well since
then though...

i really do want to replace them though because if i can ever get the mac OSX laptop up and
going then i will have a MacOSX machine, a Mac System 6.5 machine (!) and this IBM Netvista
PC i just bought to replace trusty old harvey with, which i plan to run linux on, in fact i plan
to run Sidux on it, as per Ice9's suggestion, so that should be an interesting little network
if i can get it going (i wonder if i can get the System 6.5 machine (which only has a 25MB
HDD) to play mp3s off a network location, for instance???!

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:29 am

A 25MB MP3 server? Wouldn't it get old listening to the same 5 MP3s over and over again? :)

Master of Reality · Post by **Master of Reality** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:06 am

System 6.5 wouldnt even have a USB port to add external storage?

Copperhead · Post by **Copperhead** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:19 pm

I completely forgot about this one.

If you ever resuscitate your Mac OS X box, then you can use SSHFS for OS X:

http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/sshfs/

I was using it to transfer files between my Mac and my FreeBSD box some time ago when I was creating my web site.

Calum · Post by **Calum** » Thu Jun 26, 2008 9:57 am

thanks!

well, i actually meant the classic ][e would pull the mp3s from a network location and play them, since its hard drive is too small to store the mp3s itself!

i tried vector linux on our new PC (which is apparently called "michael", after the character in the lost boys!) for about a day. it's actually great. i notice i generally do try slack for a day or three before moving on to whatever i eventually will use. the thing is, it doesn't seem to see my scanner, though all the drivers are installed etc. it'll be something to do with the init thing being bsd style instead of sysv style, but i can't be bothered working it out, so on to sidux...

this pc needs to be up before i start fiddling with the macs!