TR Forums

I figure this is the best place to ask this.

I've got an old gateway that I gutted and upgraded for my dad, I was able to salvage the 1.4g P4 from it, with memory and all that. I'm going to nail it onto a piece of particle board or something and hang it in my room with a power supply and hard drive, running linux. Primarily it will be a wireless alarm clock using Kalarm, or something of the like. I havent figured it out yet but yea.
I also have a job doing photo manipulation for a real estate agent and he uploads photos to an FTP server and I download them from there. (I'd like to have this box double as an FTP server for him, it'd greatly smooth things over.) Probably from there I might use CUPS to lan it over to my work box. Like said, I havent quite figured it out yet. (want to fiddle with linux again. lol )

Anyway I was wondering what kind of wireless card you fools would reccomend (preferably autodetected by ubuntu or the like) Less $ the better.
Also is it possible to connect to said PC using apache or the like from elsewhere using a static IP, like a DHCP from comcast's cable here in Washington?

Pardon my long winded explanation.
TL;DR: wireless server with FTP and media center capability without a keyboard. Can I use comcast's basic local cable connection and use a static IP, even if for a time?

That's a lot of questions in one post! Let's see if I can hit some of them:

Wireless - I'm more familiar with laptop wireless and there the Intel chipsets do well. There are some others that are well known amongst the Linux community, Prism is one can't remember others off the top of my head. The big problem is that typically you will see a wireless adaptor from someone like Linksys or Dlink - these guys just take the chipset and throw it on a card, without opening the package and looking at the chips or powering it up you can't tell what you are getting. To make it worse some of them change chipset without changing the model number.

Getting a hostname to resolve - go to http://www.dyndns.org and setup a hostname there - you run a little program on your computer (under Linux I use ddclient) and it will update the DNS record every time your IP changes if you have a dynamic IP, or you can set a static IP as well.

FTP server, HTTP (apache) server etc - just install the appropriate packages - this is going to vary according to your distro and you don't mention anything apart from "ubuntu or the like". I would tend to use Debian stable for servers because it is rock solid and nothing changes apart from security patches, but that will be harder to get going and the wireless support is going to be less than Ubuntu. If you are on any of those just "apt-get install ..." whatever you need.

If you take a look <a href="http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=53914&highlight=">here</a>, I've been working on getting my own web server running. It also includes my FTP server.

Getting wireless to work with Linux is more about having the right card than the right software settings. I've found a list somewhere that states which cards work great in Linux. I'll see if I can find it again.

Here's the site I posted earlier this year with a fairly good wireless card compatibility database (not sure if it's the same one you were thinking of): http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

You can have it show all PCI cards (or PCI-E, etc.): http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_host ... hostif=PCI

Thanks for the replies.

I think I've found a wireless NIC compatibility list somewhere on the internet also once before, gotta find it again.
[5 minutes later] Aha. found it!
Wish me luck navigating that labyrinth.

So all that's left is finding out how to get an IP that my boss can access and upload to. I'll be reading into what Flip-mode recommended.

Do you mean me and not Flip-mode? i.e. that you can do this via http://www.dyndns.org?

notfred wrote:

Do you mean me and not Flip-mode? i.e. that you can do this via http://www.dyndns.org?

or http://www.no-ip.com/

notfred wrote:

Do you mean me and not Flip-mode? i.e. that you can do this via http://www.dyndns.org?

er, yea. notfred, that's it.

Now I feel stupid. For some reason I read flip mode and not notfred

zoneedit.com is another option for your DNS. It's the service I'm using. I only had to purchase the domain name (which I did through zoneedit.com) and everything else is free. There were some things that no-ip.com and dyndns.com wanted me to pay extra for, but I can't remember what exactly now.