Zanziblog

Nasty comms problems, which I’ve just about sorted out now. It turns out that the only reliable communication between the Linux machines and my Windows machine is the XAMPP server that I’ve set up on my own machine! Accessing my machine as a server across the networks sometimes works, but more often not, FTP does not work, nor does Linux to Linux networking. Remote shell copy is not set up and, when I try, gives a bunch of errors. I finally set up a directory on my server for them to download files from, renaming files with PHP extension so they would not be interpreted on the server. Uploading from the Linux machines was more of a problem, and I finally ended up writhing my own PHP upload script, which works perfectly.

Stefan and Fritz (my successors), being young hotshots, can no doubt sort all of this out, but I am left with my wits, what I know, and a disinclination to delve into the innards of Linux and Windows networking, as there are more important (to me) things to do, like writing (ever more) student notes and getting on with my own project work.

Also, lengthy downloads on my laptop normally fail miserably, whereas i can leave a download on a Linux machine running overnight. I then use my file upload script to transfer to my server (even a 100MB file, (after having worked out how to extend the file upload size limit).

Also my external hard drives (a snip at £53 for 360GB) work fine except when I want to copy from Linux to my machine. A file downloaded and visible on Linux comes up as a zero-length file on my machine. This is using NTFS; haven’t tried the FAT32 drive yet, but now not necessary because of the aforementioned upload script.

From all of this I conclude that my basic technical knowledge of the innards of networking, as it was in ~1999 when I last lectured on the topic, with then current version of Tannenbaum’s networking book as my bible, supplemented by HTML/PHP file upload, is sufficient to get things working, even if it doesn’t satisfy the current generation of technorati (pace Stefan, Fritz, Werner et al)! Having said that, I did write a windows-based FTP transfer program (using the Indy library) to manage my project web uploads. Like all things here, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.