You might fire up an old clunker computer with redhat and just crossover-cable it to
another box for tinkering; here's a "gotcha" or two for really minimal office lans;


I noticed the other day redhat enterprise linux 5 doesn't "Play nice" if it has no access to dns -- it drops the connection on telnet connects upfront,
unless the telnet client's box ip address is anywhere in redhat's /etc/hosts {actual name in /etc/hosts is not important} -- that is the in.telnetd doing a paranoid reverse dns lookup; I just put a nameserver 192.168.0.85 line in /etc/resolv.conf of redhat box and that fixed it right up. This is the ip of our wideband router lan side, and it passes on dns requests out to the real
dns server(s) but it won't get that far since 192.168.x.x are unroutable addresses
anyway.... Have not tested if still lets me telnet into redhat box when office lan doesn't have an internet connection up, like in a bad storm.

By redhat 5.4 this is no longer needed, telnet works ok in all cases.
On any redhat you'll be blocked from logging in as root {telnet, I forget
if ssh too but suspect so} unless you rename redhat file /etc/securetty or delete it
or put lines in it like /dev/pts/0
/dev/pts/1
and so forth. Erm, or was that just pts/0 pts/1 and so forth?

In the samba area, both rhel5.0 and 5.4 fail to get listed in the 'network neighborhood'
bit of office winboxes when using the samba security = share
mode {which is deprecated I know but also very convenient and beloved by staffers that do not care about security} unless you tell samba to be a
master browser _and_ let it try to be a preferred contender for that in smb.conf
-- if the redhat box wins the office election to that post it will show up in the
winboxes and in windows cmd.exe net view

Even if samba is not showing up in winboxes, if you know what share name you want
to reach and the box name of the redhat box you can go in to windows explorer and
manually type in an address like \\redhatdude\fooshare
or in mac os x you can make the finder window have focus then use mouse to click on window bar 'GO' then click on connect to server then put in address of smb://redhatdude/fooshare or like smb://192.168.0.3/fooshare

Erm, and yes you can do net use u: \\192.168.0.3\fooshare
in windows cmd.exe to map a drive letter U: to fooshare of redhat box at ip . . .3
even when the redhat box isn't showing up in 'network' of winboxes.

Putting entries in /etc/hosts to mention all the ip addresses you might be using for
client computers trying to telnet into the redhat box also should clear up any really long
delays doing a telnet connect to redhat, again this is the paranoid reverse dns lookup
at fault, and does not happen on the newer rhel5.4 I think.

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