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Linux Network Basics, Graphical Network Configuration.Get the article with all the pictures in one page. (large) Who should read this? You should if you are interested in using Linux on some kind of network, and would like (or need to) learn more about how Linux is configured for such things. If you haven't already you should read the first column. Linux Network Basics, Ground Zero Expect to be pointed back to it every month. How should I read this? I will break this up in to four sections this month. The first section will be necessary reading, and you can read whatever else you are interested in. The first will contain some basic and general information about configuring your network. The second will be about using the netcfg tool to configure an Ethernet connection. The third section will be about using the netcfg tool to configure a DUN(Dial Up Networking) or PPP(Point to Point Protocol) connection and the forth will be a feedback and question section. You can read this through or just read major sections 2,3 or 4, whatever you prefer. I thought you said you would be covering GUI client(s) this month? Yes I did. :) Just the the network configure GUI(Graphical User Interface) itself turned out to be a lot of work and a lot of material. I choose to do this tool first because it is, used on Red Hat systems with which I am most familiar and it is, at least in theory portable between UNIX and Linux systems. I will definitely cover other configuration tools in future months. How does netcfg work? It is a front end to ifup, ifdown, ifconfig, route and other assorted goodies. It is fairly successful in bringing all those commands in to one simple interface. Strangely I have yet to see a page with graphical instructions on how to make this work, I aim to change that. What if it doesn't work? Am I out of luck? Not at all. I am really only covering the strait and narrow here. There are lots of valid configurations that I don't even graze here. I will cover many more topics in future columns and there other sources. How did I get that clunky old netcfg to look so good? A program called grdb. It takes a GTK (Gimp ToolKit)theme and applies it the best it can to legacy applications. You can find it at https://missoula.bigsky.net/shunter/grdb.html LAN configurationWhat information do I need? You will need to scour for some information to configure your Linux system. You will need to find your...
Where can I find these things? You can find this information by talking to your Network Administrator(The geeky guy who hangs around in the server room), or by examining your settings in Windows. There are ways to determine the settings for your Ethernet card without either. Could you give me an example? No I won't! Just kidding. Here is a sample LAN configuration with the Data I said you would need.
Now you definitely lost me, where does that stuff come from? Don't worry it's not you it is complicated, I'll get in to those details in later articles. I laid out the topology of our example in this diagram, you don't need this but it might help explain what those number point to. Isn't someone going to get mad at you for using their IP numbers in this example? The 10.xxx.xxx.xxx and 192.168.xxx.xxx IP numbers are special reserved numbers to be used on private networks. Don't use these; any decent router will knock em off the Internet at the first stop. My Network Administrator hates Linux/won't help me. Ehhh... we don't need him anyway. You can obtain this information from Windows. I use Windows 95 here but NT and 98 are similar(if not the same.) How do I get my information from Windows? Go to the start bar and Settings, then "Control Panel" LAN-win95-01-start-control_panel.jpg In control panel double click on Network. LAN-win95-02-control_panel.jpg OK that should look as follows possibly with more entries. Click on TCP/IP and then click on properties. LAN-win95-03-Network-properties.jpg Write down your IP number and Subnet mask from the "IP Address" tab. LAN-win95-04-TCPIP_Proporties-IPnumber-properties.jpg Write your Gateway address from the "Gateway" Tab. LAN-win95-05-TCPIP-Proporties-gateway-properties.jpg Write Down your DNS servers(in order), your Host, and your Domain from the "DNS Configuration" tab. You can hit cancel on the "TCP/IP Proporties" and "Network" windows. LAN-win95-06-TCPIP_Proporties-DNS-properties.jpg In the control panel double click on "System". Click on the "Device Manager" tab. Expand the network adapter field and double click on the network card shown. Click on the "Resources" Tab. Write down the IRQ, IO Range, and anything else that appears in the white box. LAN-win95-07-ethernet-hardware-stats.jpg How do I configure my ethernet card on Linux? First you should check to see if your kernel recognized your ethernet card at boot time. Use the command less to examine your /var/log/messages file for information pertaining to the device named either /dev/eth0 or just eth0 If eth0 is there your without accompanying error message, your kernel or your distribution did the work for you. If you do see an error or nothing at all, look to the "What did you say about Ethernet Mr. Technobabble?" Q and A from last month's column So what is this "netcfg" tool you speak of? Funny you should ask ;) The rest of the setup can be done with this tool. Start up X Windows as root with startx and then type netcfg & in an xterm. xterm is one of many optional terminal emulators, you have about 20 to choose from. The ampersand means give me back the command line. Click on the Names tab, and fill in the information as follows (this is actually filling in a bunch of files in the /etc/ directory)... Then click on the "Hosts" tab and click the add button... Fill in the information about your machine as follows.. TIP: if you know names and numbers of other computers you can fill them in to, it will speed the network up. Click on the "Interfaces" tab, then the add button. LAN-Linux-03-blank-Interfaces.jpg Choose "Ethernet"... Click "OK" LAN-Linux-04-Interface-Type.jpg Click the "Activate interface at boot time" radio button. The "Allow any user to (de)activate interface" will save the trouble of a root login but does what it says. Avoid it in this case. Fill in the information as follows... then Click Done. LAN-Linux-05-Edit-Ethernet.jpg Select your new entry, click on "Activate" Click on the "Routing" tab and fill in the information as follows. When done click "SAVE" at the bottom. You will need to restart networking now..in Redhat you need to type /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart You should be able to browse with Netscape now. PPP configurationWhat information do I need? You will need a bit of information to configure your Linux system.
Where can I find these things? You can find this information by calling your ISP(Internet Service Provider), by searching for it on your ISP's website. You likely were told to print it or write it down at one point. You can also obtain information by examining your settings in Windows, that is minus the password. You will have to find the password elsewhere. Could you give me an example? No I'm tired after all this typing. Just kidding.
My ISP won't help me. What do I do? ISP's are a dime a dozen, get a new one. As of March 1, 2000, I've had good luck with Mindspring.com (as long as the checks keep coming in ;) How do I extract info from Windows? Double click on "My Computer" located on the desktop. Double click on "Dial-up Networking in My Computer. You should have an Internet connection of some name, in this case it's "ISP_NAME" right click on it and choose properties. That should bring you to this window. Write down the phone number. Click on the "Server Types" tab. The window should look like this. If it says "SLIP" in the pull down window you can configure that too but I'm not covering it this time. I can tell you it's not too dissimilar. Close the "ISP_NAME" Properties. Double click on the "ISP_NAME" icon. That will try to connect you to the Internet. Write down the username from this window. Notice the password is all stars; you will need to get this elsewhere. From control panel open "System" If you don't know how to open control panel see the beginning of the ethernet section. Expand "Modem" and double click on the modem it reveals. PPP-win95-06-System_Properties-Device_manager.jpg Click on the "Modem" tab write down the COM port. PPP-win95-07-modem_properties-modem.jpg Close the "Mode-Name" window (the window you just opened) and double click on "Network" in the "control panel". click on TCP/IP and click on properties. You can look at the beginning of the ethernet section to see how to do this. Click on the DNS tab. Write down "DNS Search Order" in order and a host name if you have one. PPP-win95-08-TCP_IP-Proporties-DNS.jpg Start up X Windows as root with startx and then type modemtool & in an xterm. xterm is one of many optional terminal emulators, you have about 20 to choose from. The ampersand means give me back the command line. Click on the appropriate COM port, then click "OK". The rest of the setup can be done with this netcfg Type netcfg & in an xterm. Click on the Names tab, and fill in the information as follows (this is actually filling in a bunch of files in the /etc/ directory)... Click on the "Interfaces" tab. Click add... PPP-Linux-02-blank-Interfaces.jpg Choose the "PPP" radio button. PPP-Linux-02-Interface-Type.jpg Fill in the information as appropriate. Linux uses CHAP(Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol) by default, if upon completion that does not work try the same steps but click the PAP radio button. Click Customize when done. PPP-Linux-03-Create-PPP-device.jpg Click on the "Hardware" tab. You likely want to enable "Allow any user to (de)activate interface." radio button. Logging in and out of root to turn your modem on and off is an unneccesary extra step. On the other hand leaving it off is a great way to restrict use of the internet. If this modem configuration process fails to connect you may want to try "escape control characters" to see if it works then. PPP-Linux-04-PPP0-Hardware.jpg Click on the "Communication" tab. You will see a modified version of what you typed in earlier. PPP-Linux-05-PPP0-Communication.jpg Click on the "Networking" tab. Odds are these are of no interest to you. Ha Ha made you look. :) PPP-Linux-06-PPP0-Networking.jpg Click on the PAP tab. This screen is blank if you used CHAP. If you didn't it would look like this and the "Communication" tab would be blank. Click "Done" at the bottom. Click "Save" You should run /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart to be on the safe side (no reboots here baby!) Select the ppp0 interface and click activate. You should hear the modem going. Q and ARichard Storey asked: "How do you get a linux system to work with Window's Internet Connection Sharing?" RS continued: "I have 3 computers on a network at home with fast ethernet. Windows box does dialup and ICS. One of the computers on the network is a dualboot sys. with Linux Mandrake. I've been able to config. Linux for dialup off of the network, but I don't know where to start for the ICS." I have no experience with this personally but after reading a bit from https://www.infinisource.com/techfiles/ics.html I am going to make an educated guess. OK it seems for the sake of backwards compatibility that win98/2k use something called DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol.) Good news, this is familiar territory to Linux. You need to setup a DHCP client for your network card on Mandrake pointing at 192.168.0.1 (netmask 255.255.255.0) The 192.168.xxx.xxx network addresses are not Internet usable addresses used on private networks and Windows uses 192.168.1.xxx for the LAN (Local Area Network) side of its ICS. Your name server should be 192.168.0.1, although your isp's name servers should work too. I'm not going to go into the details of setting up DHCP, but you can find all the info you need on that at https://www.linuxhq.com/HOWTO/mini/DHCP-3.html I've heard using the pump program is the easier way. ICS is what is also known as NAT(Network Address Translator.) This is something that Linux has been doing for years by the name of IP-masquerade. If you can't get your Linux clients to recognize Windows ICS, then you can get your Windows clients to recognize your IP-masquerade. Richard Storey wrote me to say it worked. :) Next month's column will be on the command line equivalents of this tool. Don't be afraid to write me at technobabble@www.linuxmonth.com if you have a question. Big thanks to GS for being my Guinea Pig:):) Other Articles by Matthew NewhallLinux Networking Basics: Ground Zero |
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