Can I do this ?

[CompleteBeginner]

Hello,

I have Win XP Pro and Suse Linux 8.0

what I would like to know is :

1. Is it possible to set up a small 3 -4 computer network using Linux as my Server for Proxy, Logging onto and accessing windows XP including NTFS Partitions.

2. I am fortunate enough to have ADSL USB Alcatel Speedtouch Modem, If I set this up on Linux Server, I assume that I will be able to access the net from the client machines whether they are running XP or Linux via some kind of proxy server ?

3. I want also to be able to use my Seagate Scorpion 96 4 Slot DDS-3 Tape machine to do backups of all machines both XP and Linux from within Linux Server, is this possible ?

I understand that this is alot of questions, but The Mauals that came with Suse 8.0 Pro seem to be refernece Manuals and do not explain if NTFS can be used with Linux, and seem to assume that a good knowledge of networking is already known (not in my case)

Thanks in advance

[jkint]

linux is able to read from a local NTFS drive, and last I checked has shady write abilities... again.. that's when the drive's locally in the system.

reading from a network share is no problem. as long as protocols and samba are setup correctly, you're doing allright.

as far as the USB modem and that tape drive... I can't help ya there
sorry

HTRH
-jon

[baldguy]

I'm not sure if I understand what you are saying, but this is what I get. You have an XP box, a Suse Linux box and one more of the other two. If you want to use a proxy server you can try Squid which does a good job, or if you just want to access the web you can do nat and have all of your machines see the network through a translation more or less directly (i.e. ssh, telnet goes right through). Most people use samba and the windows networking to communicate between windows boxes and Linux, where the fact that one of your boxes is ntfs and the other is ext3 does not matter. As far as the tape backup is concerned if you have it working on any of the machines that can see what you want to backup on the other remotely (i.e. if you can see the Linux share that you want to backup if the tape drive is on the XP box or vice versa) then there should be no problems with backing up data (I'm not sure about running programs that are locked)

[CompleteBeginner]

I have experimented with Suse 8 last night, but it only allows me to access my Fat32 drives, my NTFS drives show up, but when I open themn they are blank, this gave me a scare as I thought I had destroyed the data installing it, but when I booted back to XP it was still there.

So if I am understanding correctly, I can see NTFS but can not view the data on it ?

[jkint]

I haven't messed with mounting NTFS drives locally on a linux system, as I've almost quit using windows entirely.. but not being able to view the data would defeat the purpose of being able to mount the NTFS drive...

do you have EFS, compression, or any other attributes enabled on those NTFS drives? how are you mounting them? are you doing this command line, or via GUI?

-jon

[CompleteBeginner]

Hi
I do not know, I installed Suse 8 Pro then went through File manager and can see all my windows drives, but I can only access Fat 32 I can still access NTFS, but when I do they show as blank, there is no compression on these drives via XP

[jkint]

the only other thing I can think of is that maybe the kernel isn't setup correctly.... might want to look into a kernel re-compile.

or possibly an issue with the XP version of NTFS... not sure how different from 2000's formatting it is.

sorry I couldn't be of more help.
-jon

[baldguy]

as root run modprobe ntfs you should load up the ntfs driver, or tell you that it is not installed

[CompleteBeginner]

Thanks for your help people