grab files from laptop w| win98?

pickarooney

Not sure if this should be posted here, but I need to grab some files quickly from a laptop running win98 via an ethernet connection (patch cable) and put them on this mandrake 9.1 machine.

Samba is running on this machine, but I can't ping the other machine, or see this one in the network neighbourhood of the laptop.

The laptop is set to get an Ip address automatically, and an ipconfig returns 192.168.1.36, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and a gateway of 192.168.1.1
In network properties, it's identified as O8E6V4 in workgroup "WORKGROUP".
Primary network connection is Client for Microsoft Networks. DNS is disconnected.

Is this going to involve weeks of reading and trial and error, or is there an easy enough method?
I could probably copy the stuff over in a few hours with floppies if needs be

Capt'n Midnight

On the Win 98 PC you could put on an FTP server app - so you don't need to worry about names and permissions and all that junk ... - but if you can't ping you don't have connectivity

Can the 98 PC ping the other PC ?
Does it have a firewall running ?
If it has a Combo card (BNC / bit of pipe) these are notorious for autodetecting anything except the connection you want to use unless there is already traffic on the cable. - Ie Power down 98 PC - start a continuous ping from the linux box and then power up the 98 PC - only applies if one of the cards has more than one network interface.

BenH

Do you have a WINS server set up in order to resolve the names? I had a similar problem with my samba config a few days ago.

niallb

If you're powering down the laptop anyway, how about
popping in a Knoppix CD before it starts up again :-)

On a serious note though, is the ethernet cable a crossover cable ?
If it isn't, you're wasting your time.
Are there lights on either network card? You should see activity when you try to ping.

Alternatively, make sure your Mandrake box has an IP
address in the same range.
Temporarily giving it the 192.168.1.1 gateway
address would be ideal.
You should also edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and change MDKGROUP to WORKGROUP and restart samba.

Mandrake has this stanza in its smb.conf file, which is ideal.
Just remove the semicolons and restart the service.
The public = yes makes it easier to browse.

# This one is useful for people to share files
;[tmp]
; comment = Temporary file space
; path = /tmp
; read only = no
; public = yes

If you still can't see it, try typing in
\\192.168.1.1\tmp
in the Start -> Run... box on the win98 machine.

If you're going for ftp, don't forget it's two way.
Zip up all your files and use put myarchive.zip
Much easier to install the ftp server on the mandrake box.
Typing ftp://pickaroony@192.168.1.1 into an explorer location bar will
prompt you for your password and give you a drag and drop access to your home directory.

If the ethernet cable is wrong, try to find even a serial cable as
it'll probably be faster and certainly more convenient than all those floppies.

NiallB

pickarooney

Crap, yes, it is a patch cable, I could have sworn I bought a crossover. I have another one which I think is a crossover, though there's nothing written on it... wait a sec, it used to be used to connect a NIC to an ehternet hub, so it's probably also a patch. Feckity feck.
In any case, there's no green light on the mandrake box' nw card with the second cable, though there was with the first one.

There's a wireless network card in the laptop too, though it's not set up properly and I don't know if there's a way to get them to communicate.

<edit> Or I could reconnect the router and plug the laptop into the connection in the attic. Yeeess, this seems more logical, captain - use the resources you have... </edit>

pickarooney

Has anyone see that episode of Fr. Ted "Night of the Nearly Dead"?
You know that bit where Ted berates the oul wans for abandoning their husbands to all sorts of potentially lethal domestic chores - "Remember your husband tried to make a cup of tea and burned the house down?"

That's me, that is.

I simply tries to connect the PC to the router and so to the cable modem, like I'd done so many times in the past in Windows.
Not a chance of it working, despite numerous cable checks, reboots of PCs and resets of routers, the connection stayed resolutely dead. So I plugged it out and set it up exactly as it was before - ethernet cable from network card to cable modem and so to the outside world.
Now when I boot up, the loader hangs for ages, faffing about trying to bring up eth0, and apparently failing. When it finally boots up and I run ifconfig, eth0 has no IP address associated, but conversely there's a new entry called eth0:9 which does have a valid-looking IP address, but no amount of configuring will make it connect to the outside world.
And now when I click on mandrake config, the mouse dies, and I ahve to reboot to get it back. Also, the sound card seems to have mysteriously gone into a lenghty slumber.

I ask you, what the screaming fsck is going on? I've tried reinstalling the OS (for the hell of it like) but no joy.

Am I just too stupid to use a computer?

niallb

Whoo, take it easy, OS reinstall almost NEVER necessary.

Am I right in thinking that your router does DHCP?
Sounds like your eth0 was getting an IP from somewhere
and now isn't. (There may be other reasons)

The eth0:9 is trying to match what a win98 and drunker machine
will do if they can't autoconfigure an interface - make up an address.

The range is the same, used for dynamic addresses.
If the DHCP server had failed completely,
your windows machine would probably show up on that subnet too,
and you might be able to see each other.

Everything you are seeing will happen if you have a dodgy cable.
Looks like one of your cables was borderline and moving it may have pushed it over the edge.
You didn't change anything on your linux setup,
so it is the same as it was when it was working.
(Excepting helpful Mandrake boottime boxes about
moving CD drives around or the like)

Try the other cable on the linux machine.
If it's working, the eth0:9 should disappear and eth0 should get a more familiar address.

Good luck,
NiallB

pickarooney

Nope, the cable is fine (I know because I finally got online by removing both NICs and changing their PCI slots, then booting from Knoppix - gotta love that saviour CD).

To reset everything I removed eth0, rebooted, shutdown, replaced eth0 and rebooted. The other network card then took on the name eth0 and the original eth1 was lost forever.

So I took it out, put it in another PCI slot, took out the other NIC (to avoid naming confusion) and booted to Knoppix. (TV-out in 5 seconds, teh win)

So now I can try rebooting to Mandrake, ignoring that row of 99 99 99 99 99... that always appears, hope it recognises the network card, that the sound comes back and I can use my mouse again, then continue trying to get a working config for the graphics card.
I'm not too fond of the fact that a noise like a 56kbps modem makes was coming out of the speakers the last time either...

Or wipe the partition and do a clean install, maybe of a different distro.
Maybe Knoppix even...

niallb

I had a similar problem with a Mandrake install recently when
I added a DVB card and stepped on a few interrupts.
I had plenty interrupts available and a knoppix disk worked fine.
Mandrake had other ideas about what resources to use.
eth0 wouldn't come up, which meant NIS wouldn't bind,
X couldn't contact its font server.
My 3 year old son spotted a key combination that I've never used at boot (he's good at that) and got into interactive startup.
Saying no to network start allowed me get to the system and fix it up.

If Knoppix is setting up all your hardware correctly, go ahead
and just knx-hdinstall it. I got the new Knoppix 3.3 last week
and stuck it on my laptop. It even had the program to switch
to TV out installed by default.
Very unlikely that you'll be missing anything you're used to,
and easy enough to get them anyway.

It makes life easier if you boot it with the right keymap first
use lang=us (gb not present and uk is something else...).

Has anyone tried the menu item for hard disk install with Knoppix 3.3 yet? The old 3.2 one always did a German install,
so you had to use the shell script.
sudo su - and then knx-hdinstall

NiallB

pickarooney

It's getting worse... mozilla won't open any pages, and the mail part won't run - missing some .xul file.
I'm trying to install Firebird, I DLed and unzipped the tarball from mozilla.org and... ?? no install, configure script, nothing I can see to install it...
Madness, Ted.

Anyoldhow, assuming I go ahead and install Knoppix, can I update stuff using Debian packages, or is it all about compiling from source? Is apt-get used in Knoppix?