Direct PC Connection

So you bring your Linkstation to a friend's place and you'd like to share some files. How ?

=Hardware setup=

Option1: Standard Ethernet cable
Your friend has a network card. Yay ! Just connect using a standard Ethernet cable or a crossover Ethernet cable. The cable supplied with the Linkstation is a standard Ethernet cable, so this one works.

The reason you don't need a crossover cable is that on the LS1 you can change a crossover switch to mimic the crossover cable, and on other Linkstation models, they are "auto-sensing" so will automatically create the crossover if needed.

In case you'd want to create a crossover cable anyway, for fun, here's howto: The image below shows the pin-layouts for the standard network crossover cables. The differences are just the colourt of the cables.



If you have...
 * 568A on both ends, then it's a Standard Ethernet straight through cable.
 * 586B on both ends, then it's a Standard Ethernet straight through cable.
 * 586A on one end and 586B at the other, then it's a Ethernet crossover cable.

Option2: Standard Ethernet cable and usb network card
Your friend does not have a network card, but has usb ports. No problem ! Buy a usb network adapter and connect on his/her PC. An example is the Linksys USB200M 10/100 USB2.0 network adapter, fairly inexpensive.

Option3: USB bridge cable
Unknown. they seem to require both ends to use the same software, and generally runs on Windows-only machines. TBD.

=Software setup=

Static IP setup on the Linkstation
as per lb_worm's suggestion, on your Linkstation, change those 2 files:

1) set the /etc/network/interfaces to:

auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.11.160 netmask 255.255.255.0 geteway 192.168.11.1 network 192.168.11.0 auto eth0:auto iface eth0:auto inet dhcp
 * 1) Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
 * 2) /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.

2) Edit the dhcp config file /etc/dhcpc/config to:

case ${INTERFACE} in eth0)  SET_DNS='yes'  OPTIONS='-d -t 30 interface eth0:auto'  ;;  *) ;; esac
 * 1) Config file for dhcpcd.
 * 1) Uncomment this to allow dhcpcd to set the DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf
 * 2) If you are using resolvconf then you can leave this commented out.
 * 1) Uncomment this to allow dhcpcd to set the NIS domainname of the host to the
 * 2) domainname option supplied by DHCP server.
 * 3) SET_DOMAIN='yes'
 * 1) Uncomment this to allow dhcpcd to set hostname of the host to the
 * 2) hostname option supplied by DHCP server.
 * 3) SET_HOSTNAME='yes'
 * 1) Uncomment this to allow dhcpcd to set the NTP servers in /etc/ntp.conf
 * 2) SET_NTP='yes'
 * 1) Uncomment this to allow dhcpcd to set the YP servers in /etc/yp.conf
 * 2) SET_YP='yes'
 * 1) Add other options here, see man 8 dhcpcd-bin for details.
 * 1) Add other interfaces here

The -d option will generate some debug.

Static IP setup on the PC
Windows XP: Start->Control Panel->Network Connections. Right click on your network adapter(likely called "Local Area Connection" ->Properties

Select "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)