Dose Linux have a 'registry' or 'ini' files?

[JimHorton]

I've been trying to set up an ethernet card, via linuxconf, and what happens is that I make changes, ie, to IRQ and io ports, and the changes are totally ignored. I click 'activate changes', and quit, then when I go back into linuxconf, the old irq's are still there! Amazing. Anyway, I've been looking for a .conf file that would say something like Eth0=3C509; IRQ=10; etc, etc. Where might this be?
--Jim

 

[ifincham]

Hi,







In answer to the 'headline' question - at present most 'ini' type info is kept in various .conf (configuration) files - e.g. httpd.conf for apache smb.conf for samba, etc. Almost all of these are somewhere under the /etc directory structure. There are 'registry' type projects for X applications - most notably GConf -->

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gconf/

.







Anyway, onto the ethernet card.... The definitive config file for modules is /etc/modules.conf (some older linux versions call it /etc/conf.modules). Either way, you would see entries like :







alias eth0 3c509







and possibly something like...







options 3c509 irq=10







These are pretty self-explanatory, hopefully. Incidentally, with that card you can't set the i/o address when loading as a module. If you have a custom kernel and build the driver in, however, you can tweak the i/o address as a parameter under lilo.







Hope this helps

 

[JimHorton]

ifincham,
Thanks, that does help. The network is now a step closer to working, ie a ping used to return: 'network unavailable' (or something, I forgot the exact), now it attempts the ping but the says 'Destination host unreachable'.

The setup I have (this is at home) is 3 machines, connected via a simple hub. All machines previously ran Win98, and I had hardcoded ip's in each, using the 192 prefix. They all connected to each other, I could vnc from one to the other, shared directories, etc, etc, all was fine.

Now, the one I converted to Redhat 7.0 (this one in question) is invisible to the others, even with ping, and vice-versa. I've hardcode the ip in the linux box, host tables on all machines are updated accordingly. Do you think it has anything to do with not having a gateway set up? I'm blurry on the concept of a gateway and how it would fit into this peer-peer network, which I guess would now be a server/client network, since the linux box is set up as a 'server'. Do I need to set a gateway or routing (another blurry area)? Thanks for any further help...
--Jim

 

[ifincham]

Hi,









As long as all the machines are properly connected to the same hub then all packets would pass through the ethernet card of each machine so there is no routing involved. All that is needed is for all the machines to be on the same IP subnet.









For example you could use









192.168.1.0 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (24 bits). All you change for each PC is the '0' part the 192.168.1.0, i.e the host part of the network, e.g.









192.168.1.1




192.168.1.2




192.168.1.101









The last bit can be whatever you like in the range 1-254 but the subnet mask must be identical on all machines.









Assuming you only have one network card in a PC, a gateway is only needed when you are trying to go outside the local subnet - in the above example to a IP address that was not in the 192.168.1.0/24 range. In such cases, a router (could be another PC with multiple NICs) would have an onward route so you'd just set the gateway to the local address of that PC. In your case, you shouldn't need it.





What do you get with '/sbin/ifconfig eth0' ? Does it look right ?









A problem you may have with Redhat 7.x, however, is the firewall which is usually on by default and blocks certain types of traffic. Configure as root with '/usr/sbin/lokkit'.









Hope this helps

 

[JimHorton]

ifincham,
Thanks very much. This has been a great learning time for me. I'm not sure I installed the firewall, as I can't find 'lokkit' anywhere. But the ifconfig results look right (not that I'd know, but they show all the parameters that I'd set).

The ping still sends packets but the destination is unreachable. I fiddled with the settings (I know that's a loaded phrase here) for the Name, ie it was localhost.localdomain. It's my sons machine (I wasn't going to have mine be the guinea pig!) so I put Alex as the name, but didn't do any domain. Then I put the domain in, and still no change. Could you enlighten me as to what exactly the 'domain' means here, and is it harmful to not use it in the name of the host machine?

It's a bit confusing, but I'm getting there. One more thing, there's a file 'isapnp.conf' that I looked at to see the irq, etc. and it had some settings in it for the 3com card. When I took the 3com (an ISA card) out and tested a linksys (pci), I had put #'s in front of the lines (I'm assuming that's the comment char.). When the linksys didn't work at all, I swapped, forgot to undo the comments, but the card seemed to work. Is this config file only used if the normal bootup doesn't detect the card?
--Jim