JediMoose

Well, this weekend I managed to do 3 things that I have never done before: create a software RAID, utilise Samba, and install Windows XP.

The last version of Windows that I can recall actually installing was my Win95 upgrade. It’s been an eye opener to look at a newer version, although I should hasten to add, for my regular readers, that it wasn’t on one of my machines….. Here are some observations:

• For all people bang on about Linux installation, Windows XP doesn’t jump straight into a graphical environment, nor does it provide a handy partition manager. In fact, you could pretty much compare WinXP with Ubuntu for the first half of its install.
• One of the installs I attempted was using a custom disk provided by a computer manufacturer. Admittedly it was not on the machine that it came with, but it provided very little feedback on what it was doing, and whether any errors were being thrown. In fact, the reinstall was due to a failing Windows boot, which also provided scarce information as to the source of the problem. Custom install disks are bad, and always have been – we should get genuine MS media if we buy a computer – make sure you do.
• An attempted restore completely failed to restore effectively. I still wonder why, by default, there isn’t an option to create a seperate partition for user data (/home/username on Linux, or C:Documents and Settingsusername on Windows). Admittedly, Windows has more of an excuse here, given that it’s way of mapping drives to letters is slighltly more unwieldy than Linux’s.
• From what I can tell, Windows Update is essentially a server-side ActiveX script – I can’t understand (given that MS is already leeching huge chunks of data of your machine) why they don’t implement a small client that holds up-to-date information about your system, which it can then pass to the server in order to download the relevant updates. (Maybe I’ve misconstrued what it does, though – feel free to enlighten me) I would also recommend, given the bad press on the web about machines getting infected before they’ve had time to download the patches, that MS incorporate an automatic update as part of the install (like many Linux distros…..).
• I am slightly sceptical about the ‘optional’ registration with MS that comes after the product activation – part of me wonders whether or not they won’t get the ‘optional’ information from the system anyway.

For those of you not familiar with RAID, here is a quick summary: A ‘Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks’ is basically a series of physical drives that appear as a single disk to the computer. There are different types of RAID, for different purposes. This weekend I was playing with RAID-1, aka ‘Mirroring’ whereby you use 2 disks, and everything is written to both disks. Thus if one fails, all the data is on another.
These days you can buy relatively cheap ‘hardware RAID’ cards, which do all the magic of deciding where to write data themselves. However, a cheaper option is to use Linux’s software RAID support. And here I must take my hat of to the excellent How-To provided by the Linux Documentation Project. Of this How-To only one page was required for me to get everything running. Once the RAID device is created (in my case from 2 partitions, one on each disk), it’s just a matter of syncing them. Then you have your RAID device (/dev/md0) which you can treat like any other disk device – format it, and the mount it. I couldn’t believe how easy it was.

Lastly, I wanted to setup Samba. Samba is a piece of software that allows Linux machines to use the SMB protocol, which is a Window protocol for networking. Simply put, it allows Linux machines to pretend they are Windows machines to the network. In my case, the idea was to allow the aforementioned RAID device to be available to the whole network, thus creating a single repository for vital information that is properly backed up.
Samba was a little trickier to setup, although I have to admit that Debian did most of the hard work. Here are a few pointers from my installation:

• From what I could tell, no passwords were set initially for any users. Run smbpasswd to set these. Also, check that the user(s) you are wanting to use is already in the /etc/samba/smbpasswd file
• Check that the user you are using has permission for the directory you are sharing
• Make sure that you spell writeable the incorrect way (writable) otherwise it won’t be
• The name of your share is the bit in the square brackets at the top of its definition. Your hostname becomes the servername, although it appears to be capitalised (eg mine was \Debian\public)

The last piece of computer-y action that happened this weekend was that I installed Ubuntu on Heather’s new computer (PIII-800, 128MB RAM, 30GB hdd). She’s been using Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org for a while now, so I hope that the transition will be relatively easy. Plus I’ve installed Scribus, which looks like it’s become a top-quality DTP suite in the last couple of year. More on that later.

mrBen