Synergy, the “hosts” file, BigMomma, FC4 (or SuSE?) quirks
Yesterday was the exciting part – working on Midget. Today’s job? Unite all computers as if they were one, using Synergy. Unfortunately, Synergy seems to not like networks that are too cool for NetBIOS hostnames. It prevented me from using IP addresses instead of hostnames, so for a while I was stuck. Then I heard about the “hosts” file, which can be found on any Windows system in \system32\drivers\etc\hosts. I decided to give it a look, and before long I had mapped my entire network to use DNS-based “hostnames!”
A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed Synergy, but I didn’t do most of the work until today. I instralled Synergy on lapdawg and nighthawk on Wednesday and was unsuccessful in getting it to work because it failed to properly look up the NetBIOS hostname “nighthawk” (it didn’t exist, really) and it refused to let me use Nighthawk’s IP address. So I left it alone and ignored it for a couple of days, but I remembered the “hosts” file today and figured that if I put Nighthawk’s IP in there then maybe Synergy would work. So I tried it, and…TADA! it worked. Unfortunately, due to a (apparently one-time) firewall bug, Lapdawg bluescreened and I had to reboot. 0xD1 and fwdrv.sys – a.k.a. Kerio Firewall – for those who are interested (ahem, Microsoft?).
So I got the laptop to work with Synergy. But what about BigMomma? So I transferred the Synergy tarball over via FTP and *cough* compiled it myself *cough*.
Now, there is something that you all must understand about NetBIOS. It’s a Windows thing. Linux hosts do not normally have NetBIOS hostnames, and even if the Samba service is running, the firewall often blocks out the NetBIOS ports. So that’s why my network is too cool for NetBIOS. Actually, I prefer to call it “too secure” for NetBIOS. (hint hint, nudge nudge, Mr. Gate$.)
The problem with FC4 is, it has this thing with multiple hostnames (one for each network interface). So I can’t make BigMomma part of the “fuhrykitchentable” domain and have my loopback interface be localhost at the same time. And anyone who’s at all experienced with Apache web server knows that the hostname assigned to lo (that’s LO, the Unix way to refer to the loopback iface) must be “localhost.localdomain” in order to start. No different on the highly-superior-to-other-distros Fedora Core 4. So, after a little help from Neal, I taught BigMomma that 192.168.2.40 is more commonly known as “nighthawk” and that 192.168.2.39 prefers to be called “lapdawg.” Unfortunately, BigMomma still thought of herself as “localhost”, so when I tried to connect to Nighthawk using Synergy, it failed because BigMomma called herself “localhost” instead of “bigmomma.” Thank God for the guy who wrote Synergy’s documentation – I was able to use aliases to teach Synergy that “localhost” was really “bigmomma”. So finally I got Synergy to remote-control BigMomma.
And then I remembered one thing: BigMomma spends 95% of her time in text mode (to save RAM). Why in the world would I need to control her using a KM program?