I've got a good one...

I decided to (at least temporarily) set up my server using RedHat 7.3 (wasn't sure anything more recent would run on that 128 MB of RAM). NAT was easier than hell to set up, just added 3 lines to a config file and it worked without further configuration, which was nice...but then the stuff that I thought would be easy turned out wrong.

I installed Samba during the install, went through Services and checked it to start automatically and then manually started it.

rpm -q Samba gave an answer, verifying that samba was installed.

So I go into etc and try pico smb.conf so that I can share some directories so that I can drop files in from my Windows client, and get "new file"

exit out, and try cd / followed by whereis smb.conf

Returns output of smb: (blank line)

I'm a lazy ass. I don't want to manually type out the entirety of smb.conf by hand, and even if I did, the fact that it should be there and isn't seems symptomatic of a bigger problem.

I *can* use smbmount to mount a Windows share from the server, but it's the client I'll be sitting in front of all of the time.

Oh, and by the way, the vnc viewer won't contact the server, but I don't know bugger about setting up a vnc server. I know the vnc server was installed at the time I installed the OS, but I expected that I'd just have to give my root password to administer the server remotely via VNC...the viewer won't even contact the server though. I know I've got the IP address right (192.168.0.1)

And Unne, don't put in a link to Gentoo.org. My server's CPU is an Athlon 700. I've spoken to someone who took five days just to *install* Gentoo with a 500 MHz system. I don't plan on going 5 days with no internet whatsoever just so that I can install Gentoo on a server that I'm not even going to be using save through a client.

whereis doesn't search your whole HD, it only searches certains specific places, mostly your $PATH, so it misses plenty of files. A better command is locate, which does search your whole HD, but it actually only searches a database of files that it updates regularly, so it can also miss things if a file has been recently added and hasn't been seen and added to locate's DB yet. A BETTER command is find /etc -name smb.conf, which will definitely find the file if it exists in /etc or its subdirectories. In any case my samba config file is /etc/samba/smb.conf, but yours might be in a different spot. If worse comes to worse, reinstall samba and it should reinstall the config files too, shouldn't it? If you still don't get one, I'll copy/paste mine here and you can copy/paste it onto your HD.

To set up vnc, I think you just run vncserver, and the first time you run it it asks for a password, which is stored in ~/.vnc/passwd or something. It'll auto-detect which X display numbers are free at the moment and pick one to bind to. Look at the output of vncserver and it should say which X display it just set up on (1, for example). Then to connect, it's vncviewer 192.168.1.100:1, that is, IP:Xdisplaynumber.

(I happily ran Gentoo on a PIII 550. It took me about 2 days to install, and that's including KDE, which took probably one of those whole days itself. Gentoo has binary packages for speedy installs now too, if you go for that kind of thing. *dodge*)

That's still 2 days with no internet at all. Bugger that.

Unless I can run NAT during the install, but NAT requires changes to a config file (the name of which escapes me at the moment) in /etc/rc.d/

Installing Mandrake (:p) went fine for me, up to the point I had to connect (pppoa is the devil), because it took me a while to understand why the hell shorewall was blocking my ISP's attempts to let me connect after I got the IP from its DHCP server.
Anyway, once that done, sharing the connection took as long as opening the main config panel and following the internet connection wizard. I have to admit it imperfectly works though (the laptop connected to the mandrake pc sometimes can't open some websites. Some work, some don't; beats me). I have the feeling I'll solve the problem when we get the new PC with an adsl router.

As for searching, updatedb will (as the name says) update the list for locate.

And samba has a gui for me (I know, you're on a slow machine, so kde 3 is out), so I don't have to manually edit the config files for it.