Network interfaces

[danceswithcats]

Hi all,

The walkthrough is amazing. I started with it this morning and everything was going swimmingly-Ubuntu on server, putty, VNC and webmin all up and running, blood pressure normal , and then I went for a bit of lunch, and when I got back, I think I got cocky.

I was following the section called How to set a fixed or static IP address in Ubuntu, on this page: http://www.havetheknowhow.com/Install-Ubuntu.html and I have made a right bollocks of it. Now my server is not recognised on the network, so I can't run it in Putty or VNC. I can get into my router and it doesn't recognise the server, although I have double checked that it is plugged in.

I searched this forum for various relevant phrases and realised that I should probably have switched off dhcp in my router first, but I'm not sure and I'm kind of nervous about doing anything now. I've put my old monitor back on the server and got this output from sudo cat /etc/network/interfaces:

#This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5)

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

#The primary network interface
auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.256
broadcast 192.168.1.255
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi: you're my only hope.

[Ian]

Hi,

I would change the 256 in

Code: Select all

address 192.168.1.256

to be a lower number. So, something like 250 or 251.

You should NOT disable DHCP on your router as it'll stop pretty much everything else being able to connect to your network.

Ideally you should change the DHCP RANGE of your router to be less than 250 to stop it giving 192.168.1.250 to someone else. It's unlikely it'll ever happen but not impossible.

Does that help?

Ian.

[danceswithcats]

Thanks, Ian.

The DHCP page of the advanced settings in my router gives a Start IP and an end IP value. Is that the range? I chose 256 because it was outside that range. Start IP is 192.168.1.2 and end IP is 192.168.1.254.

So, I should open the config file on my server, and change the address to 192.168.1.250

Then, I should change the router end IP setting to 192.168.1.249

Is that right?

Grovelling thanks, as standard.

Pete

[danceswithcats]

It's worked!!! Ya beauty!!!

Thanks again.

I'll post updates as I progress. I'm moving on to virtualisation now.

[vl1969]

just an FYI, as it seams that you are not well versed in networking stuff (no offence meant),
you can not just arbitrary choose a number to be used in IP.

"IPv4 addresses are canonically represented in dot-decimal notation, which consists of four decimal numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255, separated by dots, e.g., 192.168.1.1 Each part represents a group of 8 bits (octet) of the address. In some cases of technical writing, IPv4 addresses may be presented in various hexadecimal, octal, or binary representations.
"
as you can see the range for each octet is total of 256 ip numbers with 0 and 255 are being reserved for system use
so realistically you can only choose numbers from 1 through 254 as your id.
also id 1 is usually used by your router but that is not really set in stone, just a very common situation.

appliing this to your setup

"
address 192.168.1.256 <-- this is wrong it can only be a number between 1 and 254!!! also as seen below 1 is already used by your router

broadcast 192.168.1.255
netmask 255.255.255.0 <== this show you that your defined range of IPs (the last of the 4 octets is 0 to 255)
gateway 192.168.1.1 <== this is your router IP hence as we said above number 1 is reserved for it. but you can change this if desired (although I would not recommend it )
dns-nameservers 192.168.1.1 <== this show that your router is also your DNS server (i.e. it translate the ids from names to IP address and back) thus if you have your PC name as " MyOfficePC" with IP= 192.168.1.200
" and you go on the network from your laptop and type ping MyOfficePc in command line windows the router would translate that into 192.168.1.200 and return that info back to you.

[danceswithcats]

Certainly no offence taken. Thank you. This whole exercise is meant to be educational as well as practical, so that's a help.

I seem to have got it now, with the help of your earlier reply. I can log in to my server with putty and have just created and mounted partitions with webmin, but I can't get the VNC up. I can't use tightVNC because I'm on an Ubuntu desktop and don't have a Windows machine available. Nobody seems to have got VNC quite right on Ubuntu yet.

Next step: start recording my CDs onto the server, on my lovely new partitions. I might leave it for today, though. 8 hours is quite enough on a day off.

[vl1969]

good luck with that, I have all my CD/DVD library ripped already

as for VNC I can never seams to get it working for me properly.
why do you need VNC on a server? or do you have a DE loaded on it?
also try ramina for client. it's linux based, very user friendly
and can do telnet, vnc ,rdp, ssh. all in a single client and even at the same time.

I currently have a file server on OpenSuse 13.1 with LXDE , VNC is not working on it but I managed to
make xrdp installed. unfortunately it will, not stay loaded so I have to SSH into machine first, start an xrdp session and than RDP into desktop. do both from ramina and it works swimmingly.

however with Webmin why even bother?
I am planning a conversion for that server to move to Ubuntu 14.04 server and make it a file server and VM server,and I think that except Webmin/cloudmin I am not loading anything else on it.

[danceswithcats]

I ripped all my music in ogg vorbis, when hard drives were smaller and more expensive. Now I'd like to have it in FLAC: at least the classical and jazz. I'm planning to run ethernet cable under the floorboards and connect raspberry pi with audio cards to two stereos, and use the PS3 in the main room.

But it will take time.

No, I don't need VNC, I suppose. I was just following Ian's instructions, and it helped my confidence this morning. I've just realised I can connect to the server using ssh in a terminal, instead of using putty: what an idiot! Next Monday, when I have another free day, I will take a proper dig round webmin.

Thanks very much for your help. Please watch out for my desperate posts again.

[vl1969]

will do...

you should watch out for mine as well :-)

[vl1969]

a quick check-in here.
last night I rebuild my server as per the guide referenced in your main post. (well I used that mostly for references as I had install the Ubuntu server before), in case you did not see my post with my networking issues a couple of days ago, all is fixed and up and running. after initial update/upgrade I decided to follow the setup VNC howto as well (even though my plans include webmin and cloudmin setup).

if you follow the guide step by step it works well. however before you do anything make sure you get the static IP setup and that you can SSH into the box properly.
once all the steps are done and you run vncserver -geometry:1920x1080 what ever command you should have a functioning vnc setup.

in windows there might be several VNC clients that will work good, for Linux I find nothing really beats Remmina.
you can do many clinets from the same interface as it supports RDP, VNC and others also have a SSH support
but for ssh you can simply run terminal. I actually preffer terminal for ssh as you can cut/past into it with keyboard ctl+shift+v , in remmina ssh you need to use menu command. have been playing with all the setup all evening, looks very nice. even had the cloudmin installed. still lots of thing to configure before all this is done but so far looks very promising.

as a side note, after the initial Server setup, and after making sure I can ssh into the box. all of the subsequent installs and configurations have been done via SSH and VNC from my main Linux Mint machine. I mean everything. if you need any help ask away :-) but most of the things is simple cut/past execute