Connecting all of my home computers together

JaceSchin

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So I am looking for some help on what I need to search for in order to find out how to wirelessly connect all of my home computers together so I can easily share files between them. I haven't been able to find what I am looking for. I've tried searching peer to peer ad hoc, home server, nas server. Most of what I find is Windows to Windows or Mac to Mac.

I'd like to be able to connect my two Mac laptops and one Linux desktop (hopefully two Linux desktops soon). Would I need a Raspberry Pi or something? Or some kind of server? Do I just use my internet router?

Any ideas to point me in the right direction of what I should be searching for would be great, Thanks!!
 


You can use your internet router. If you define the shared resources on the different devices through the SMB protocol (Windows share) or you'll ensure that all the systems understand it.

This is how I have defined all my NAS shared folders and it works like a charm in mac OS, Linux and Windows, as long as you don't need to preserve the unix permissions for the files in the shared folders.

PS - I believe that AFP (apple file protocol) will work everywhere too, but I think I read was about to be discontinued, or it's no longer used by Time Machine. Be cautious with this!
 
Hey gvisoc!

Thanks for helping me out again! I'll check that out
 
No problems. Just a heads up before you try, you will have to make some configuration on your network for this to work easy (e.g., using something like smb://mylaptop/myshare).

Assuming that your router won't act as a NIS server, meaning that it won't autodiscover and publish the names of your machines, you can do the following:

1) you may want to either configure the router to always lease the same IP addresses to the same devices (by static DHCP lease), or go to your devices, one by one, and configure their IP as static. This will ensure that the network links to the shared folders won't change as the IP address would change in a purely dynamic lease scenario.
2) Create /etc/hosts entries in your Mac and GNU/Linux machines, and c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in windows, to have entries like this (assuming that your network is 192.168.0.x):
Code:
192.168.0.10 mylaptop
192.168.0.11 myraspi
Change the IP addresses and names for your owns, and do not remove any previously existing lines on those files!
 
Q: can this be done WITHOUT using Samba?
 
Nautilus is giving me this error about Samba:
Samba's testparm returned error 1: Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf
Loaded services file OK.
ERROR: pid directory /run/samba does not exist

I also have Dolphin (not the emulator one,haha) on this computer because I started out using the KDE desktop and then switched to Gnome. When I use Dolphin I do not get that error though. So I was wondering if KDE put the smb.conf in a place that Gnome doesn't like.

I appreciate the help gvisoc! But most of this stuff is pretty over my head, I'm really bad at networking. Do you know of any step-by-step hand holding guides to follow? If not that's ok, I might just drop it for now and come back to when I understand the basics of networking better.
 
@JaceSchin -- how may PCs to connect? and their proximity to each other? are you adament on wireless?
 
@JaceSchin -- how may PCs to connect? and their proximity to each other? are you adament on wireless?

Right now I really just have two my MacBook Pro and my Linux desktop. I'm not set on wireless. I don't need the connection for any reason important. It's just a project to learn more about computers and about Linux.

Do you think it would be better to learn how to set up a wired connection first and then learn how to do a wireless connection?
 
Simpler and more secure to go with wires.
Wireless is where the majority of hacks occur for homeowners.
And I, personally, will not use Samba. But the OP said 'wireless.'
May he change his mind to ethernet and add a VPN, but this just my opinion based on experience and research.
 
I do this everyday with several Linux systems, I don't use Samba.
Mostly NFS. Wifi works with NFS. I have some wired, some aren't.
 
Ok cool! Thanks for sending the links, I'll check them out. Sounds like the wired stuff is simpler. I play with that for a while and then graduate to the wireless stuff. This wasn't as simple as I thought it would be, haha. I think I am missing some fundamental knowledge to understand everything you guys are saying. I might start out by taking a beginners networking course.
 
I do this everyday with several Linux systems, I don't use Samba.
Mostly NFS. Wifi works with NFS. I have some wired, some aren't.
Of course they work with wifi. I was referring to the shared resource definition in the server, and accessing it from the clients, that is quite different.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I have tinkered with it, NFS requires requires /etc/fstab mounting, whereas with Samba, the users' applications like file managers themselves can set up access for it by adding a smb://server/share location, regardless if that means automounting or not. As far as I know, there's no nfs://... equivalent and, for a first go in setting up a home network, that's a downturn.

WiFi doesn't make a difference once you can connect to the network.

On a personal nerd note, I dropped NFS shares at home because my Synology NAS wouldn't let me encrypt the shared folder if I was to share it through NFS (I don't know if it's a limitation of the DiskStation Manager or of NFS itself). Having to enable client encryption for using that share was worse than losing the unix permissions by using samba.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the synopsis on NFS vs Samba for wireless! Helpful!
 
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I have tinkered with it, NFS requires requires /etc/fstab mounting, whereas with Samba, the users' applications like file managers themselves can set up access for it by adding a smb://server/share location, regardless if that means automounting or not. As far as I know, there's no nfs://... equivalent and, for a first go in setting up a home network, that's a downturn.

If you have windows 10, you can do this.

But if you have windows 8.1 or older you will need third party software $$$.
If you are just going Lunix to Linux it's easy.
The /etc/fstab isn't required, but it makes things easier as it will "auto-mount" the drive
at boot time for you.
 

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