On Wed, 17 Aug 2016, Richard Owlett wrote: > On 8/17/2016 10:09 AM, Darac Marjal wrote: > >>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.
Too bad it is WinXP, otherwise you'd have instant connectivity via IPv6 SLAAC. > >If you're connecting the two machines with a single cable, then > >either the cable needs to be a "cross-over" ethernet cable, or Gigabit ethernet uses all wires on both directions at the same time (well, at least 1000BASE-T does) using quite advanced line coding and echo cancelation to get away with it. It doesn't need (or want), a cross-over cable. A straight CAT-5e, CAT-6 or CAT-6A patch cable will do (assuming the cable is *good*, and not bargain-bin defective junk that would never pass certification). > >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. > > I'm using Lenovos - a T43 and a R61, each with Gigabit interface. The T43 can't do 1 Gbit/s easily due to the relatively slow Pentium-M processor, but should be able to do 400~600 Mbit/s (using Linux, anyway. No idea about WinXP). That T43 will be able to go twice as fast (maybe even saturate the gigabit ethernet link) on larger transfers if you kick the MTU up to 9000 bytes on *both* devices (Debian and WinXP), but this is more advanced stuff I suggest you leave for later. > >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) > > Ahh the question is HOW <chuckle> > Bought Cat6 straight thru cable. Neither machine has a light to blink, but > both reacted indicating cable present - but no communication established > YET. You could install isc-dhcp-server on the Debian side, and configure it to serve dynamic IPs. The WinXP side will ask for an IPv4 address and get it from the Debian box. But that's going to be annoying unless you do the extra step of anchoring the WinXP IP by configuring its MAC address in the isc-dhcp-server config file. It would be easier to use static IPs in both sides. The how-tos for Windows XP will be accurate enough for that. Use, e.g., 192.168.55.10, with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 for the Debian box, and 192.168.55.20 for the WinXP box, with the same netmask. You don't need a gateway. The static IPs can be configured in Debian by editing /etc/network/interfaces, "man interfaces" will tell you more. If you want to transfer files properly or mount remote drives from one computer to the other, install the "samba" package in the Debian side. The "samba" documentation at samba.org is really good and should be enough to tell you how to configure it (expect to spend some time on this). That should be enough to get you going, and you will learn a *lot* from this. Good luck. -- Henrique Holschuh
