Many homes now have multiple computers connected together
via router/switch combinations creating small home networks.
These networks will almost always have at least one
MS Windows machine on it
(In my case 2, both of my daughters have laptops,
one w/ Vista and one w/ XP)
NOTE: my one daughter does VNC into the
Linuxbox to run Linux sessions quite often.
We also have 2 desktop machines running Linux,
one is used as the main desktop and the other
is used as a central file server among other things.
This allows me to easily manage storage, access permissions
and back-ups while allowing everyone to share files, pictures, videos, etc...
In order for the Linux server to communicate with the
Windows machines, it has to support the smb (Server Message Block)
protocol. Linux implements this by running the smb.d daemon
commonly known as a
Samba server.
In my next post, I will demonstrate the installation and configuration
of the Samba Server (which comes with most every distro) as well as
setting it to automatically run on startup.
Got an older PC lying around, too slow for Vista,
install Linux and make it a file server.
