Small home network

I'm home for the summer, and thus away from the lovely campus network. 'm interested in setting up a network around the house.

My primary box--the one I'm on right now--runs Linux, and everything else in the house runs Windows.

My question is how best to network them together--I've tried with my secondary box, running win98, but I can't seem to get the Linux box to recognize the other one, or vice versa.

I have Samba configured, but I don't know what else I should set up, so that the Linux box will assign IP's, etc.

Is there a tutorial for this somewhere?

For linux to assign IP's you need Bind running. Samba just makes it so the win boxes can access the linux box. And smbclient make the linux box access the win boxes. If you are not running XP home, you can set up the linux box as a primary domain server, and that may assign IP's, but I am not sure. I haven't played with Samba as a PDC. If you only have a couple of boxes, it might be easier to just give every machine a static ip address.

Bind really has nothing to do with assigning IP's....BIND is DNS...Assigning of IP's comes from DHCP or BOOTP.

The best way to do it is to assign static IP's on the same network segment and make your your netmasks are set correctly. Also, if you are not using a hub or a switch, make sure you are using a crossover cable to connect the two machines. Give me a bit more detail about your setup, and I will help you get it working.

And of course make sure you have IP connectivity and you can at least ping the other box before attempting to configure SAMBA.

Thanks... I needed a little bit of that too because I'm working on Networking Unix and Linux computers.. I need some tutorials on it though..

Well, here's what's going on.......

I have one system, my Linux Box [ RedHat 7.1 ], that I want to be the main server for the setup. I also have a laptop [ win98 ] that's connected to it. Eventually, my mom's laptop's going to be tied in also......

Yes, I do have a hub, and each system does have an ethernet card. 'nything else you need to know?