First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I am sending this from my laptop that is current running (gasp) MidiFlux. GASP -- puke -- run away!

Ok, this is purely experimental. However, MidiFlux gives me two things that Mepis (antiX) doesn't have. This is the opportunity for folks way smarter than I am to tell me how to come back to antiX.

1. Wifi & hotspots. Not sure this one can be fixed. Mepis doesn't search for available wireless networks. Mandriva/PCLinuxOS does. Mandriva sniffs out wifi connections all over my neighborhood. This question probably has to go to WV (I grew up a half hour south of Warren HQ). This no-search is probably the weakest cog in the Mepis distro.

2. Printing. Here's my home configuration -- DSL into a hub, wireless router plugged into a hub. Wireless/laptop gets IP address from the hub, an artificial one. So, to print I have to disable CUPS on my laptop and use the CUPS running on my desktop computer, to which the HP K60 is attached. Mandriva utilities easily walk me thru it. Can't do it (yet) using Mepis. ... Anyone know how to print thru the Internet on Mepis?

Honestly, folks, if I can resolve these two issues I'll be reloading antiX onto this laptop. It is faster than MidiFlux. However, MidiFlux offers me two"must have" things that Mepis doesn't seem to have.

Warren?

Don
Fairmont WV (first 18 years)

´Can´t help you with #2 but the answer, for me, was to find and install the program ¨wifi-radar¨. I can take my portable to the coffee shop, work or use my home wireless network with no problems or fiddling with settings. It works for me...ymmv.

It sounds to me that your printer and laptop are on two different networks. What is the reason for the"hub"? Also I was unaware that a hub would act as a dhcp server.

The router should be first on the chain to serve addresses. This will act as the base for the network. You can still use the hub if needed to connect more machines but they should all get their address from the router. In order to print or share over a network they all have to be in the same adresss range ie:192.168.1.? or 192.168.0.?. The actual numbers don't matter as long as they are in the same range.

The other option is to give everything static ip addresses to force them to use the same ip range. The router may block any traffic behind it since is designed to be a hardware firewall but this could be changed.

eriefisher

EDIT: If the hub can serve addesses then the router must be set to bridge mode(disable the dhcp server).

eriefisher wrote:It sounds to me that your printer and laptop are on two different networks. What is the reason for the"hub"? Also I was unaware that a hub would act as a dhcp server.

I didn't explain things as well as I should have.

The desktop systems get dynamic IP addresses from my ISP and are connected via a switch. The printer is attached to one of these desktop systems (CUPS).

My wireless router (access point) is also plugged into the switch and has a dynamic IP address. However, the wireless router provides a 192.xxx.xxx.xxx-style address to the laptop.

So yes, the laptop is essentially on a different network than everything else.

nero wrote:´Can´t help you with #2 but the answer, for me, was to find and install the program ¨wifi-radar¨. I can take my portable to the coffee shop, work or use my home wireless network with no problems or fiddling with settings. It works for me...ymmv.

I played with wifi-radar a little bit on antiX and I had some problems, but can't seem to remember what they were. Seems like it had something to do with not playing well with my WEP-Restricted configuration.

In that case I would put the router first, then connect all machines to it. Let the router serve local addresses it will get it's address from the isp. If needed you can connect the switch to the router for more connections but most routers have 4 or 5 connections.

This way all your machines will be on the same local network to allow printing and sharing while being protected from the internet via the router.

Your current setup is potentially unsafe, particularly for windows boxes. By connecting the router to your dsl modem first you protect everything behind it and create a local network for your machines to interact.

You once mentioned you had a server. Most routers have the ability to create virtual servers. When there is an http request at your address it will be routed to the server you set up and not interfere with the rest of the boxes on the network.

There is a way to set up file and print sharing across networks but that is alot more difficult and above my pay grade.

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:In that case I would put the router first, then connect all machines to it. Let the router serve local addresses it will get it's address from the isp. If needed you can connect the switch to the router for more connections but most routers have 4 or 5 connections.

Yea-but ...

That would be an easy solution except for one small issue: I run Apache and FTP servers on the machine to which the printer is attached, so must have a real IP address rather than a 192.xxx.xxx.xxx IP. (To answer your next question -- how do I accomplish this with a dynamic IP? -- I use DynDNS to get the domain name of don.homelilnux.net and the dynamic IP address doesn't seem to change, even if I reboot the system.)

Yea-but ...

That would be an easy solution except for one small issue: I run Apache and FTP servers on the machine to which the printer is attached, so must have a real IP address rather than a 192.xxx.xxx.xxx IP. (To answer your next question -- how do I accomplish this with a dynamic IP? -- I use DynDNS to get the domain name of don.homelilnux.net and the dynamic IP address doesn't seem to change, even if I reboot the system.)

The router should be able to take care of this. It will route all http and/or ftp traffic to a designated local ip address. You should have some way to set up different services such as virtual servers in the router. Log on to the router, you should see it somewhere. What type of router is it"make/model".

Mine has a section to select type of services/traffic, what port to use and where to send it to(which box). Yours would be:

http port 8080 or 80 <ip of server>
ftp port 21 ??? <ip of server>

The server itself would not know the difference nor would the person connecting to it. It's usually pretty simple to set up.

eriefisher

Hi dieselbenz

I know little of both your issues as I don't have wireless nor a network, so I would be interested to know what Midiflux uses. Is it simply through the mandriva tools or are the tools just a front end to other apps?

anticapitalista wrote:Is it simply through the mandriva tools or are the tools just a front end to other apps?

Yea, it is 100% Mandrake/Mandriva tools stuff. Someone spent a lot of sleepless nights coding this. Probably nothing but scripts w/ a GUI front end but extremely sexy. They refer to it as PCLOS Control Centre (obviously, with that spelling, a Brit did the coding! <grin).

I've tried to identify how this is done and have come up empty so far. I am sure it is buried in there -- just haven't turned over the right rock yet.

Here is an example of what is"really cool" about it. Inside Control Center, there is a place to set up an Apache web server. Once you invoke it, the program automatically downloads the Apache stuff for you. But then -- and here is the really cool part -- it asks if you WANT to enable user directories from within the server. You say yes (don.homelinux.net/~don) and it then downloads the required files and configures that for you.

I've done that in Slackware -- a bit of manual editing of the config file!

Please note that antiX is MUCH faster than any PCLOS derivative -- but PCLOS includes some killer tools. AntiX is still top dog for"fast on old hardware" -- I am simply seeing how much blood I can get out of a turnip.

It sound like a nice front end. For what you are doing though Apache is pretty heavy duty. You could easily get away with Lighttpd. I have never set it up But I have looked at the docs and it looks pretty simple. Like Apache you just put everything in /var/www I think. I have it installed, I will try to set something up in the next couple of days to test it out.

On your router issue look for anything called Forwarding or services.

eriefisher

diesel,
Don't run off (as in back to work) in the middle of this one. This is great stuff!

eriefisher,
Thanks for the heads up on Lighttpd.

I posted a similar question at mepislovers. They suggested wlassistant. I decided not to install it because it had quite a few dependencies, some of which were kde components. Next, I was going to install netapplet, but it had a ton of dependencies most of which were gnome. I did install network-conf, but it did not recognize my wireless card. So, I installed wifi-radar and it just worked.

Depending on your box, you may want to try wlassistant or netapplet, although I think netapplet hasn't been updated in awhile. Or if you can let me know what's going on with wifi-radar I may be able to help.

john

AntiX 7.01 again running on the laptop.

Wifi-radar looks like it will meet the wireless hotspot need (as of yet untested). Still struggling with the Internet printing issue on Mepis but hope to figure it out.

Don

In cups you can point to an address to print. In your browser just type in localhost:631 to get the cups interface and select add printer. Follow the steps and when asked use the http:// address of the box that has the printer connected. The printer must be shared on that box but there is an issue here. If you share a printer on a computer with a public ip address anyone can print anything on that printer if they know it's there. Even if the printer is turned off everything will be sent to the spooler to wait for the printer. This could be dangerous.

eriefisher