• Linux on a Server

    From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to All on Sun Nov 20 13:33:46 2022
    I am managing to do everything I want to so far on my Ubuntu MATE laptop
    thanks to the help from this group.

    I have a beautiful HP Z620 with Dual Xeon processors and 64 GB RAM that's crying out to be set up as a server so I am going to experiment.

    It has an NVMe device on a PCIe card, Windows won't boot from it and
    Googling says nothing will, it is just too old to do that, I may just try
    it though - Ubuntu has been full of pleasant surprises so far!

    I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a couple
    of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of things or
    whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my personal
    home drive.

    Any thoughts? I am happy to experiment :-)

    I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 13:38:42 2022
    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

    Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.

    Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

    --
    /home/jeff/Documents/newssig

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 16:01:45 2022
    On 20 Nov 2022 13:38:42 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

    Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.

    Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

    Ubuntu MATE went on to the NVMe on the Z620 as good as gold but then it wouldn't boot!

    Anyway it's fine now, I put it on an SSD and it's good as gold. I am
    struggling to share anything on it. I have been watching YouTube all
    afternoon telling me do this, do that, edit this, create this user etc.
    etc.

    If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?

    Why is my sig so weird???

    --
    /home/jeff/Documents/newssig

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  • From Martin Gregorie@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 17:14:41 2022
    On 20 Nov 2022 16:01:45 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    On 20 Nov 2022 13:38:42 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

    Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.

    Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

    Because it is: Use a text edotor to build your sig block and set the Pan configuration parameter to point to it.

    Anyway it's fine now, I put it on an SSD and it's good as gold. I am struggling to share anything on it. I have been watching YouTube all afternoon telling me do this, do that, edit this, create this user etc.
    etc.

    If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?

    There are decent archiving tools to help with that. To send one-off data
    sets I use gzip and attach the compressed archive to an e-mail. Or you can subscribe to DropBox or similar websites.

    If you want to share stuff more generally, get a login on SourceForge,
    GitLab, etc or set up your own website.

    I have both but my websites are hosted by Zen, rather on my own kit,
    because this allows me to set my home firewall to refuse all incoming connections. I maintain master copies of my websites on my house server
    and use gftp to install changes and new pages on the public version on
    Zen's webservers.

    Incoming mail? I use 'getmail' to retrieve incoming mail by polling my
    mailbox at Zen every 10 minutes.

    Outbound mail? I send that by handing it to a local copy of Postfix (a
    mail server on my house server), which handles all mail transfers on my
    local LAN and passes outbound mail to Zen for delivery across the 'net.

    Its common practise to run a mail server on every Linux system as well as convenient: for instance, that allows all your Linux systems to send their daily logwatch reports to your usual workstation via internal email on
    your LAN - which means yo don't have to go hunting for them because there
    just turn up as part of yout inbound main stream.

    Why is my sig so weird???

    See my previous message.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Martin Gregorie@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 16:44:28 2022
    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:


    Any thoughts? I am happy to experiment :-)

    How much filestore space are you planning to put on the system?

    For instance, I'm finding that 500GB is plenty for my needs: I've been
    running Linux since 1999 and have accumulated:
    - mail archive (200,000 emails in a PostgreSQL database)
    - a fair collect of personal images
    - code+source I've written
    - flight traces (I'm a glider pilot

    All this plus Linux and WINE (some of the gliding apps are Windows
    programs) occupy 40% of the available disk space, so you may need less
    storage space than you're guesstimating.

    More data: I also have an old Thinkpad R61i (i3 chip) whose disk died and
    that now runs much faster off a Sandisk 128GB SSD. When its disk failed
    there was no longer any spinning rust available that was smaller than
    300GB, but the R61i can't support any disks bigger than 250GB - I found
    that out the hard way - which is why it has the Sandisk SSD fitted.


    I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

    I haven't seen one, so you didn't.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Andy Burns@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 17:12:39 2022
    Jeff Gaines wrote:

    If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?

    Share to what? if windows, then install samba.

    Why is my sig so weird???

    Looks like it's taking the sig as literal text, not as a filename, just put the text you want as the sig there, instead of the filename?

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  • From Chris Green@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Sun Nov 20 17:20:13 2022
    Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:

    It has an NVMe device on a PCIe card, Windows won't boot from it and
    Googling says nothing will, it is just too old to do that, I may just try
    it though - Ubuntu has been full of pleasant surprises so far!

    I have a set-up a bit like that on my desktop machine at home. It's a
    fairly old Fujitsu Esprimo and I added the NVME disk on PCIe. The
    BIOS can't see the NVME disk so I can't boot from it. So I have /boot
    on a small partition of a SATA drive that the BIOS can see and the
    main root filesystem and /home on the NVME disk. It took a little
    while to get it configured to boot but once done it has been very
    reliable.

    I run xubuntu on it.

    Oh, one imprtant detail, once booted Linux can see the NVME disk, if
    this doesn't happen you have a problem! :-)

    If I remember right I got it to work by first installing everything on
    a SATA disk with separate partitions for /, /boot and /home. Once
    this was up and running I copied the / partition to the NVME disk and
    changed /etc/fstab to use that instead of the SATA disk, job done.
    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Nov 20 21:04:12 2022
    Am 20.11.2022 um 13:38:42 Uhr schrieb Jeff Gaines:

    Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

    Check the settings. Maybe you entered that path as a signature.

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  • From Adrian Caspersz@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Mon Nov 21 00:28:42 2022
    On 20/11/2022 13:33, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I am managing to do everything I want to so far on my Ubuntu MATE laptop thanks to the help from this group.

    I have a beautiful HP Z620 with Dual Xeon processors and 64 GB RAM that's crying out to be set up as a server so I am going to experiment.


    Proxmox VE.

    Then you can put whatever you like on top of that.

    Lots of Linux OS builds, Windows and Mac too.

    --
    Adrian C

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Mon Nov 21 14:15:59 2022
    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
    couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
    things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my personal home drive.


    An update.

    My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
    steer :-)

    I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows partition
    and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of suggestions online that
    a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer. There are loads
    of articles online about sharing a mounted drive but they all assume you
    have got past the basic action of formatting the drive!

    --
    Jeff Gaines
    Dorset, UK

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  • From Java Jive@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Mon Nov 21 15:53:12 2022
    On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    There are lots of suggestions online that
    a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer.

    Not, repeat *not*, NFS, which stands, IMS, for Network File System, and
    is Linux' traditional networking protocol. You're confusing it with
    NTFS, NT File System, as in Windows NT, where the NT originally stood
    for New Technology, the 'new' being a supposedly entirely 32-bit Windows
    as opposed to the preceding 16-bit versions, but IIRC was criticised at
    the time for being in fact something of a hybrid.

    If you have a dual-boot system between Linux and Windows, then, yes, a
    shared data drive is probably best formatted as NTFS, which can be read
    and written by both OSs, whereas Linux formats cannot natively be read
    by Windows.

    --

    Fake news kills!

    I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
    www.macfh.co.uk

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  • From Java Jive@21:1/5 to Java Jive on Mon Nov 21 16:36:36 2022
    On 21/11/2022 15:53, Java Jive wrote:
    On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    There are lots of suggestions online that
    a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing
    system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer.

    Rereading the above, I realise that potentially it's ambiguous ...

    If you mean you have a dual-boot system with both Linux & Windows OSs,
    and wish to share data between the two, then all the below is true ...

    Not, repeat *not*, NFS, which stands, IMS, for Network File System, and
    is Linux' traditional networking protocol.  You're confusing it with
    NTFS, NT File System, as in Windows NT, where the NT originally stood
    for New Technology, the 'new' being a supposedly entirely 32-bit Windows
    as opposed to the preceding 16-bit versions, but IIRC was criticised at
    the time for being in fact something of a hybrid.

    If you have a dual-boot system between Linux and Windows, then, yes, a
    shared data drive is probably best formatted as NTFS, which can be read
    and written by both OSs, whereas Linux formats cannot natively be read
    by Windows.

    ... however, if you mean that on any given machine you want to make data available over a network to other machines which might be running either
    Linux or Windows, then the situation becomes a little more complicated.

    As stated above, the Linux/Unix networking protocol is known as NFS. On
    the machine sharing the data, you need to set up an NFS server,
    including creating a file called /etc/exports with details of the data
    areas to be shared. On the machines wishing to connect to the NFS
    server over the network, you need to set up NFS clients, with which you
    can connect on an ad hoc basis, and/or set up permanent connections in
    the file /etc/fstab.

    You probably know already that Windows machines can talk over a network
    via NETBIOS over TCP/IP, and so can Linux machines using Samba, though connecting the latter can be a little clunky. It used to be that you
    could create a file called by default /etc/samba/smbusers which
    contained translations between Linux and Windows user names, which meant
    that if you were signed on as a Linux user who had in this file a
    username mapping to a corresponding Windows username, and if the
    passwords were the same, authentication would occur automatically and connection would simply be a matter of navigating to the share via the
    file manager of the particular Linux distro involved. However, this
    doesn't seem to work any more, and now when you navigate to a Windows
    share you have to click the machine and authenticate to get a list of
    shares, and then click the share and authenticate again to access that,
    a real bore.

    Windows never used to be able to access NFS shares, but 7+ - perhaps
    Vista+ but I can't state definitively on that - include an option to
    do so:
    Control Panel,
    Programs and Features
    Turn Windows features on and off
    Services for NFS

    I've not tried using this, so can't comment on how well or otherwise it
    works.

    --

    Fake news kills!

    I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
    www.macfh.co.uk

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  • From Pancho@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Mon Nov 21 18:35:21 2022
    On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:
    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
    couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
    things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my
    personal home drive.


    An update.

    My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
    steer :-)

    I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows partition
    and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of suggestions online that
    a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer. There are loads
    of articles online about sharing a mounted drive but they all assume you
    have got past the basic action of formatting the drive!



    I format EXT4 for Linux. You can use NTFS or vFAT, but I found it slower
    than EXT4. The downside of EXT4 is that they are difficult to read if
    you physically transfer the disk into a Windows machine.

    Something like

    <https://www.tecmint.com/create-new-ext4-file-system-partition-in-linux/>


    I then use Samba for sharing disks, from Linux to Windows.

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  • From Vincent Coen@21:1/5 to Jeff Gaines on Mon Nov 21 22:34:10 2022
    Hello Jeff!

    Monday November 21 2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote to All:

    On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

    I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
    couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
    things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as
    my personal home drive.


    An update.

    My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
    steer :-)

    I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows
    partition and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of
    suggestions online that a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I
    don't know if that is a filing system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer. There are loads of articles online about sharing a mounted drive but they all assume you have got past the basic action
    of formatting the drive!

    Not a nfs that is a differing bag of worms - I suggest using ntfs as a
    driver is available under Linux to read/write to them or even loading a
    ext4 or other format onto Windows. As for Linux there are a range of
    differing drivers for both platforms and for that matter OSX (OpenBSD).

    Another option under Win 11 (and possibly 10 - I have forgotten) is the WSL
    -
    Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly
    on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual
    machine or dualboot setup.

    From : https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-subsystem-for-linux/9P9TQF7 MRM4R

    System Requirements
    Available on: PC
    OS: Windows 10 version 19041.0 or higher
    Architecture: X64 arm64
    Keyboard: Integrated Keyboard
    Mouse: Not specified



    Vincent

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  • From Jeff Gaines@21:1/5 to Vincent Coen on Tue Nov 22 10:17:29 2022
    On Mon, 21 Nov 2022 22:34:10 +0000, Vincent Coen wrote:

    Not a nfs that is a differing bag of worms

    In accordance with Linux tradition it may be that "nfs" stands for "not a filing system" :-)

    Many thanks for your reply and Java Jive's, I must have mucked up my
    settings in Pan because a big chunk of the thread has disappeared. I will
    let "Disks" format the drive since it will certainly know better than me
    and it doesn't offer nfs. I think I will then try and setup the share with Samba as my main PC will be running Windows for a while until I have more experience with Linux.

    Many thanks all :-)

    --
    Jeff Gaines
    Dorset, UK

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