Dotan Cohen wrote: > >> Can I configure an FTP server locally, that would allow for easy > >> connection via Windows Explorer, Konqueror, and Nautilus? I need the > >> ability to transfer files in both directions. Thanks in advance for > >> any ideas.
MS-Windows machines have an ftp client by default. So you could initiate a connection using the ftp client on MS. But MS does not include an ftp daemon and so without installing something like Cygwin's ftp deamon it would be difficult to symetrically have connection ability both ways. But you could investigate Cygwin if you needed that capability. If you can restrict to just always connecting from the MS client then you can copy files both ways from that client without needing to install anything else on the simple MS clients. Also, if you have an Apache web server enabled then the clients can pull files by http. That may be even simpler for your purpose than using ftp. However that would be a one way copy only. Still might be useful in that direction though. No encryption overhead from SSH. No passwords. Just go. But you need to think about whether security is required for those files or not. > Also, as there is no router involved, how would the the "other" > machine connect to my machine? Will I need to install a DHCP server? > Can I assign a name to my laptop, so that the other machine could just > connect to that name? Yes. If I were doing this I would install a DHCP server such as dhcp3-server on my Debian machine and have it serve addressees for the thin clients that are attached on the wire. Most simple MS client machines are configured for DHCP and therefore they would be assigned an address automatically at connection time and no reconfiguration of them would be needed. However on your "server" machine you would probably need or want to reconfigure for this configuration on and off as you needed it. You might have a script that swaps configuration files between your two configurations. Because you wouldn't want a dhcp server running on the wire if you were to plug into a wired network yourself for normal use as that would probably produce two dhcp servers there! Don't break someone else's network! But if you turn things on and off only as needed then you should be okay. Using dhcp would assign addresses. Use a private RFC1918 address range such as 192.168.*.* and you can use the numbers to refer to your server machine immediately. If you want to use a name then that is more complicated. For that you would need to set up a DNS nameserver on your machine that would serve that name to your dhcp clients. That is certainly reasonable and relatively easy to do. You can use a private domain name without needing to register it globally. There are lot of strong opinions about the best nameserver software. Personally I would install bind9 and then set up a zone for a private domain. Configure dhcp to tell clients to use your server for the nameserver. Seems like it should work fine. > Thanks! I have been googling this all morning and I cannot believe > that not many people have been in this situation before, it seems so > commonplace. I think most people are satisfied with sneakernet using hard media for transfer. But don't let that stop you. :-) Bob
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