I am managing to do everything I want to so far on my Ubuntu MATE laptop
thanks to the help from this group.

I have a beautiful HP Z620 with Dual Xeon processors and 64 GB RAM that's
crying out to be set up as a server so I am going to experiment.

It has an NVMe device on a PCIe card, Windows won't boot from it and
Googling says nothing will, it is just too old to do that, I may just try
it though - Ubuntu has been full of pleasant surprises so far!

I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a couple
of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of things or
whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my personal
home drive.

Any thoughts? I am happy to experiment :-)

I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

> I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...

Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.

Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

--
/home/jeff/Documents/newssig

On 20 Nov 2022 13:38:42 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

> On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>
>> I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...
>
> Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.
>
> Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

Ubuntu MATE went on to the NVMe on the Z620 as good as gold but then it
wouldn't boot!

Anyway it's fine now, I put it on an SSD and it's good as gold. I am
struggling to share anything on it. I have been watching YouTube all
afternoon telling me do this, do that, edit this, create this user etc.
etc.

If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?

Why is my sig so weird???

--
/home/jeff/Documents/newssig

On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

> Any thoughts? I am happy to experiment :-)
>
How much filestore space are you planning to put on the system?

For instance, I'm finding that 500GB is plenty for my needs: I've been
running Linux since 1999 and have accumulated:
- mail archive (200,000 emails in a PostgreSQL database)
- a fair collect of personal images
- code+source I've written
- flight traces (I'm a glider pilot

All this plus Linux and WINE (some of the gliding apps are Windows
programs) occupy 40% of the available disk space, so you may need less
storage space than you're guesstimating.

More data: I also have an old Thinkpad R61i (i3 chip) whose disk died and
that now runs much faster off a Sandisk 128GB SSD. When its disk failed
there was no longer any spinning rust available that was smaller than
300GB, but the R61i can't support any disks bigger than 250GB - I found
that out the hard way - which is why it has the Sandisk SSD fitted.

> I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...
>
I haven't seen one, so you didn't.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

Jeff Gaines wrote:

> If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?

Share to what? if windows, then install samba.

> Why is my sig so weird???

Looks like it's taking the sig as literal text, not as a filename, just put the
text you want as the sig there, instead of the filename?

On 20 Nov 2022 16:01:45 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

> On 20 Nov 2022 13:38:42 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>
>> On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>>
>>> I am not sure if I have set Claws properly to add a signature...
>>
>> Apologies to Pan for calling it Claws.
>>
>> Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?
>
Because it is: Use a text edotor to build your sig block and set the Pan
configuration parameter to point to it.
> Anyway it's fine now, I put it on an SSD and it's good as gold. I am
> struggling to share anything on it. I have been watching YouTube all
> afternoon telling me do this, do that, edit this, create this user etc.
> etc.
>
> If I just want to share one folder is there an easy way to do it please?
>
There are decent archiving tools to help with that. To send one-off data
sets I use gzip and attach the compressed archive to an e-mail. Or you can
subscribe to DropBox or similar websites.

If you want to share stuff more generally, get a login on SourceForge,
GitLab, etc or set up your own website.

I have both but my websites are hosted by Zen, rather on my own kit,
because this allows me to set my home firewall to refuse all incoming
connections. I maintain master copies of my websites on my house server
and use gftp to install changes and new pages on the public version on
Zen's webservers.

Incoming mail? I use 'getmail' to retrieve incoming mail by polling my
mailbox at Zen every 10 minutes.

Outbound mail? I send that by handing it to a local copy of Postfix (a
mail server on my house server), which handles all mail transfers on my
local LAN and passes outbound mail to Zen for delivery across the 'net.

Its common practise to run a mail server on every Linux system as well as
convenient: for instance, that allows all your Linux systems to send their
daily logwatch reports to your usual workstation via internal email on
your LAN - which means yo don't have to go hunting for them because there
just turn up as part of yout inbound main stream.

> Why is my sig so weird???
>
See my previous message.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:
>
> It has an NVMe device on a PCIe card, Windows won't boot from it and
> Googling says nothing will, it is just too old to do that, I may just try
> it though - Ubuntu has been full of pleasant surprises so far!
>
I have a set-up a bit like that on my desktop machine at home. It's a
fairly old Fujitsu Esprimo and I added the NVME disk on PCIe. The
BIOS can't see the NVME disk so I can't boot from it. So I have /boot
on a small partition of a SATA drive that the BIOS can see and the
main root filesystem and /home on the NVME disk. It took a little
while to get it configured to boot but once done it has been very
reliable.

I run xubuntu on it.

Oh, one imprtant detail, once booted Linux can see the NVME disk, if
this doesn't happen you have a problem! :-)

If I remember right I got it to work by first installing everything on
a SATA disk with separate partitions for /, /boot and /home. Once
this was up and running I copied the / partition to the NVME disk and
changed /etc/fstab to use that instead of the SATA disk, job done.
--
Chris Green
·

Am 20.11.2022 um 13:38:42 Uhr schrieb Jeff Gaines:

> Anybody tell me why the news sig looks like a link to a file?

Check the settings. Maybe you entered that path as a signature.

On 20/11/2022 13:33, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>
> I am managing to do everything I want to so far on my Ubuntu MATE laptop
> thanks to the help from this group.
>
> I have a beautiful HP Z620 with Dual Xeon processors and 64 GB RAM that's
> crying out to be set up as a server so I am going to experiment.
>

Proxmox VE.

Then you can put whatever you like on top of that.

Lots of Linux OS builds, Windows and Mac too.

--
Adrian C

On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

> I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
> couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
> things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my
> personal home drive.

An update.

My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
steer :-)

I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows partition
and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of suggestions online that
a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing
system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer. There are loads
of articles online about sharing a mounted drive but they all assume you
have got past the basic action of formatting the drive!

--
Jeff Gaines
Dorset, UK

On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>
> There are lots of suggestions online that
> a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing
> system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer.

Not, repeat *not*, NFS, which stands, IMS, for Network File System, and
is Linux' traditional networking protocol. You're confusing it with
NTFS, NT File System, as in Windows NT, where the NT originally stood
for New Technology, the 'new' being a supposedly entirely 32-bit Windows
as opposed to the preceding 16-bit versions, but IIRC was criticised at
the time for being in fact something of a hybrid.

If you have a dual-boot system between Linux and Windows, then, yes, a
shared data drive is probably best formatted as NTFS, which can be read
and written by both OSs, whereas Linux formats cannot natively be read
by Windows.

--

Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk

On 21/11/2022 15:53, Java Jive wrote:
> On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>>
>> There are lots of suggestions online that
>> a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing
>> system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer.

Rereading the above, I realise that potentially it's ambiguous ...

If you mean you have a dual-boot system with both Linux & Windows OSs,
and wish to share data between the two, then all the below is true ...

> Not, repeat *not*, NFS, which stands, IMS, for Network File System, and
> is Linux' traditional networking protocol.  You're confusing it with
> NTFS, NT File System, as in Windows NT, where the NT originally stood
> for New Technology, the 'new' being a supposedly entirely 32-bit Windows
> as opposed to the preceding 16-bit versions, but IIRC was criticised at
> the time for being in fact something of a hybrid.
>
> If you have a dual-boot system between Linux and Windows, then, yes, a
> shared data drive is probably best formatted as NTFS, which can be read
> and written by both OSs, whereas Linux formats cannot natively be read
> by Windows.

.... however, if you mean that on any given machine you want to make data
available over a network to other machines which might be running either
Linux or Windows, then the situation becomes a little more complicated.

As stated above, the Linux/Unix networking protocol is known as NFS. On
the machine sharing the data, you need to set up an NFS server,
including creating a file called /etc/exports with details of the data
areas to be shared. On the machines wishing to connect to the NFS
server over the network, you need to set up NFS clients, with which you
can connect on an ad hoc basis, and/or set up permanent connections in
the file /etc/fstab.

You probably know already that Windows machines can talk over a network
via NETBIOS over TCP/IP, and so can Linux machines using Samba, though
connecting the latter can be a little clunky. It used to be that you
could create a file called by default /etc/samba/smbusers which
contained translations between Linux and Windows user names, which meant
that if you were signed on as a Linux user who had in this file a
username mapping to a corresponding Windows username, and if the
passwords were the same, authentication would occur automatically and
connection would simply be a matter of navigating to the share via the
file manager of the particular Linux distro involved. However, this
doesn't seem to work any more, and now when you navigate to a Windows
share you have to click the machine and authenticate to get a list of
shares, and then click the share and authenticate again to access that,
a real bore.

Windows never used to be able to access NFS shares, but 7+ - perhaps
Vista+ but I can't state definitively on that - include an option to
do so:
Control Panel,
Programs and Features
Turn Windows features on and off
Services for NFS

I've not tried using this, so can't comment on how well or otherwise it
works.

--

Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk

On 21/11/2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote:
> On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
>> couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
>> things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as my
>> personal home drive.
>
>
> An update.
>
> My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
> steer :-)
>
> I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows partition
> and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of suggestions online that
> a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I don't know if that is a filing
> system, a protocol or what so I would appreciate a steer. There are loads
> of articles online about sharing a mounted drive but they all assume you
> have got past the basic action of formatting the drive!
>

I format EXT4 for Linux. You can use NTFS or vFAT, but I found it slower
than EXT4. The downside of EXT4 is that they are difficult to read if
you physically transfer the disk into a Windows machine.

Something like

<https://www.tecmint.com/create-new-ext4-file-system-partition-in-linux/>

I then use Samba for sharing disks, from Linux to Windows.

Hello Jeff!

Monday November 21 2022 14:15, Jeff Gaines wrote to All:

> On 20 Nov 2022 13:33:46 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

>> I'm not sure whether to use an SSD for the OS and local data then a
>> couple of separate drives that I can mount as the "server" side of
>> things or whether to put the OS on an SSD and set the NVMe thingy as
>> my personal home drive.

> An update.

> My sig was set to text rather than file, now fixed, thanks for the
> steer :-)

> I have added a 2 TB SSD to the HP 620 and removed the Windows
> partition and added a partition in Ubuntu. There are lots of
> suggestions online that a shared drive should be nfs, problem is I
> don't know if that is a filing system, a protocol or what so I would
> appreciate a steer. There are loads of articles online about sharing a
> mounted drive but they all assume you have got past the basic action
> of formatting the drive!

Not a nfs that is a differing bag of worms - I suggest using ntfs as a
driver is available under Linux to read/write to them or even loading a
ext4 or other format onto Windows. As for Linux there are a range of
differing drivers for both platforms and for that matter OSX (OpenBSD).

Another option under Win 11 (and possibly 10 - I have forgotten) is the WSL
- Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment --
including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly
on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual
machine or dualboot setup.

From :
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-subsystem-for-linux/9P9TQF7
MRM4R

System Requirements
Available on: PC
OS: Windows 10 version 19041.0 or higher
Architecture: X64 arm64
Keyboard: Integrated Keyboard
Mouse: Not specified

Vincent

On Mon, 21 Nov 2022 22:34:10 +0000, Vincent Coen wrote:

> Not a nfs that is a differing bag of worms

In accordance with Linux tradition it may be that "nfs" stands for "not a
filing system" :-)

Many thanks for your reply and Java Jive's, I must have mucked up my
settings in Pan because a big chunk of the thread has disappeared. I will
let "Disks" format the drive since it will certainly know better than me
and it doesn't offer nfs. I think I will then try and setup the share with
Samba as my main PC will be running Windows for a while until I have more
experience with Linux.

Many thanks all :-)

--
Jeff Gaines
Dorset, UK