Help building a home network needed.

I have one computer with internet connection and printers that I would like to connect to another computer to use as a practice/test Server. I would like the server to access the other computer by a direct connection of some sort because I don't see the point of aquiring the hardward (ethernet card) to send info back and forth to a computer that is two feet away.

Any help or search terms will be appreciated!:slight_smile:

You will eventually find that the cost in time for data transfer over direct connect will many times exceed the cost of an ethernet card and patch cord.

You can do it with serial ports and a terminal emulator, or even with hyperterm which is free, if you want to connect to the server from a windows box.

There are multiple ways if you are attempting unix to unix.

Might help if you told us what would be on both ends of the wire.

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Since I'm a nix enthusiast ;and not just trying to accomplish a task , I would like to get some experience with Plip. I have been digging into this subject because I was going to study Apache but networking is important also and I need a network to do this.. With Windows it looks like there is a hardware faction and a software faction to networking so I tried to find some (Network Manager) info. My distro has system-config-network 1.6.1 and as you may have guessed there is no option for plip. There is one for Tokenring but I can't find even remote info on that subject that is close to practical. So it looks like Network Managers is pivotal to this venture that I can download and configure. If I can't acquire a Manage for Plip than I will have to go another route. I'm not totally apposed to a NIC but it is not my first choice.

My client computer currently has and outdated version of Fedora but is working well. I have a lot of applications installed on it and no problems as of yet so I will be leaving this O.S as is. For the Server I was thinking of Installing Centos.

NetworkManager does not support PLIP. PLIP is a very old file transfer protocol from the LapLink era. You will probably have to make your own cable I doubt if you can purchase these cables nowadays. See Wiley :: Red Hat Fedora Linux 2 Bible for pinout details.

Do yourself a favor and just install a NIC.

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Presently I would like to get some experience with plip but not alot of people are wise to it. Does anyone know how files are transfered after the daemon is running? Are bash commands used?

                        Thanks again!:wall:

You can use any of the networking commands that transfer files such as ftp if they are available to you. You can also use cp if you manage to NFS mount a filesystem over PLIP.