On Wed 17 Aug 2016 at 11:34:25 (-0400), Miles Fidelman wrote: > On 8/17/16 11:09 AM, Darac Marjal wrote: > > >On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 09:45:39AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote: > >>I wish to connect two laptops via Ethernet. > >> > >>The Debian machine is having various configurations of Jessie > >>installed. Consider it a laboratory experiment. It can have > >>multiple installs in a day. It intentionally has *NO* internet > >>connectivity. It has a small partition set aside for preseed.cfg > >>and miscellaneous scripts. > >> > >>The second machine is running WinXP Pro SP3 and serves as source > >>of preseed and script files. > >> > >>My internet searches turn up too much outdated information > >>and/or fine detail. Most link assume a server with multiple > >>clients. Better description would be a peer to peer setup. It > >>may be convenient to have the Windows machine act as a terminal > >>for the Debian machine. > > > >If you're connecting the two machines with a single cable, then > >either the cable needs to be a "cross-over" ethernet cable, or one > >or other other the devices needs to support "Auto-MDI/MDIX". > >Support for that was patchy in 10M/100M devices but it mich more > >common in Gigabit Ethernet devices. > > Or you could just plug both machines into a cheap ethernet hub. > > > > >Once you've got the physical layer sorted (that is, green blinky > >lights on both machines), then the rest of the configuration > >should be much the same as any network: > >* Either give the hosts unique, static IPs OR > > Run a DHCP server on one of the machines > >* Either refer to the hosts by IP address OR > > Run a DNS server on one of the machines OR > > Write the hostnames in /etc/hosts > >(%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows) > > > > If you're continually rebuilding the Debian machine, you probably > don't want to fool with peer-to-peer setups. Probably better just > to enable the ftp server already built into Win XP.
When I connect two machines together, I just use the IPv6 addresses which seem stable enough that I have aliases set up for them. It also means I don't have to disturb the IPv4 wireless configuration that all the machines have picked up by DHCP. > Another thing to do is install PuTTY on the WinXP box as a > telnet/ssh client. Cheers, David.
