Anyone set up a home network with multiple OSes

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RockDiesel

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Nov 29, 2007
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I have 4 computers,3 for me and 1 for my girlfriend, and I decided that setting up a home network could be a decent idea. However, 1 of my computers is Mac OSx, another WinXP and the third is a Linux box that I dick around with a bit. I haven't had any luck finding any information on setting up a network with computers that have varying operating systems.

The main reason I want to do this is because I would like to share the printer, instead of only having one computer that can print and the other is because I have a 1TB external HD that I would like to access from all computers too.

Anyone done this before with multiples OSes and have any tutorials they can send me too? Is it even possible to set up a multiple OS network?
 


Yes. Very possible. The OS of the client computers doesn't matter at all.

Just plug everything in like you normally would. Setup the Linux box as a print server to share the printer to the Windows and Mac boxes. Same with the external drive. Windows and Mac OS have ways of connecting to shared Linux drives (namely Samba).
 
Over a network via SAMBA (which is pretty much built in) you can easily share data between OSX, Windows and Linux machines. In OSX its very easy to just go into System Preferences, then sharing, then file sharing and click on option for samba.

Setting up the share on the OSX machine is going to be the easiest. Followed by XP then followed by *nix (depending on the distribution).
 
alexb said:
Yes. Very possible. The OS of the client computers doesn't matter at all.

Just plug everything in like you normally would. Setup the Linux box as a print server to share the printer to the Windows and Mac boxes. Same with the external drive. Windows and Mac OS have ways of connecting to shared Linux drives (namely Samba).
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Cool, thanks for the info.

Now here is where my retardedness sets in, so I will break it down the way I understand it and you tell me if I am right.

First, plug all computers into my wireless router?
Second, unplug printer and HD from XP box and plug back into Linux box?
Third, set up Linux box as print server?
Fourth, set some settings up so I can access both printer and HD from all computers?
Fifth, access all my porn from every computer?
 
What they said. On my network at home I have 2 wired Macs, a wireless Macbook, wireless PC laptop, PS2, Xbox and wired PC buit as DVR as well as ipod touch and PSP. Nearly everything works great, the only problem is the PC laptop, it has Vista (suck it MS) my printer is USB and connected to one of the Macs. I have issues printing from Vista to it and file sharing with the Vista machine. Everything else plays well together fine out of the box.
 
I think any shared drive like the terabyte has to be FAT formatted not NTFS for Macs to see it.

I might be wrong.
 
I just set this up a few days ago. I moved all my files to a CentOS box and ordered some gigabit hardware to speed up the network. Now I just need to setup nightly drive replication so I can have a backup of all my stuff.
 
Drake said:
I think any shared drive like the terabyte has to be FAT formatted not NTFS for Macs to see it.

I might be wrong.
Click to expand...

If its shared, it doesn't matter what format it's in. Only if the device is being plugged directly into the machine.

If you have an external harddrive for example plugged into USB or FireWire, OSX can Read/Write FAT32, but read-only NTFS (unless you install NTFS-3G which is a free driver). But over a NAS or shared over Samba, it won't matter what format it's in. The main thing to keep in mind is that FAT32 cannot hold files larger than 4GB, but NTFS can.

And if sharing off the Mac , "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" (aka HSF+) will be just fine and if shared over Samba, the other machines can see it and use it just fine. Same if you shared an ext2/ext3 partition on a linux box over samba.
 
so anyone have any tutorials they could link me too?

google hasn't been my friend so far in my search
 
Stanley said:
Break it up into chunks - what are you trying to figure out?
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Mainly what to do with the Linux box. I barely dick around with Linux, so setting up sharing and stuff I don't know about.

EDIT: ok, I tend to overcomplicate things, so thanks to your comment on breaking it up into chunks I am now finding some info that is helping me.
 
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