Build A Cross-Platform Test Network With Samba & GRUB

An anonymous reader writes "This tutorial shows how to combine Samba and GRUB to build a compact, highly adaptable, cross-platform test network, capable of booting and networking a large number of operating systems on a small number of machines. Though Samba and GRUB can manage many different operating systems, this tutorial focuses on Linux and Windows." Reg required on the story.

Comments

Cross-platform via networking

[Turing Machine]

Interesting stuff, with some good humor (I especially liked "Windows NT/2000/XP are not possessed of such tender sensibilities; still, we'll deceive them too, as they have their own little quirks. Besides, it's easy and fun.").

Personally, I hate rebooting and I also need to test my Java code on Mac OS X, so how I handle this problem is by keeping my source code in a directory on my Linux machine mountable via Samba and NFS. Compiling and testing on Windows 2000 or OS X is just a matter of hitting a button on the KVM switch. You could probably do it via VNC if you don't want to invest in a KVM (or, of course, if you don't mind having multiple monitors and keyboards, you could just have independent machines).

Wow, that's...really not worth reading.

[FiloEleven]

The article focuses mainly on installing multiple OSs with Grub as the boot loader. This information is widely available (and without registration). The section I was interested in was on Samba. Which it doesn't talk about except to say "here's a tutorial, because I don't feel like writing about this stuff."

Waste of time.

Re:Wow, that's...really not worth reading.

[Blkdeath]

The article focuses mainly on installing multiple OSs with Grub as the boot loader. This information is widely available (and without registration). The section I was interested in was on Samba. Which it doesn't talk about except to say "here's a tutorial, because I don't feel like writing about this stuff."

I found it mostly a vanity piece, really. Much of the advice she gave was quite frankly wrong, silly, or unclear (ie; could have used context).

Examples;

• Hiding Linux partitions from Win'98? Why?
• How is it "tricky" to create a Windows partition with Linux's fdisk? (It's no more/less complicated than creating a Linux Swap partition, FYI).
• Debian is the only Linux with a package management system? ("Everyone except Debian users must unpack the tarball")
• zcat and pipe a tar.gz through tar?
• GRUB can only be installed from floppy?!?
• Disable encrypted network passwords in Windows?
• Explicitly set all NICs to 100TX?

Advice given by self-ascribed "gurus" should be taken with a suitable quantity of NaCL, in my humble opinion.