fillingim.us not quite ready

i still haven't got the home webserver to work outside of my house. right now, though, i've got a (potential) problem with the hard drive on my primary computer. on bootup its giving a message about "imminent failure." this disturbed me enough to backup all my data. since i don't have an external hard drive to do the backups on, i figured the easiest way would be to get samba working on the new linux box and just dump everything to there. after an hour of so of working with it, i was not able to get it to work. since i was on a time schedule that day, i just used leechftp to transfer everything important. i'm kind of glad that i was leaving the house because it took quite a while to transfer the 60GB of data. monday i got back on trying to get samba to work and i can see the linux machine from the windows network but i can't access any shares. i've tried every option in the smb.conf file that i've found suggested on the web but nothing seems to make a difference. there is something called nmb that seems to not be working but i don't know yet what this does. i tried to reinstall samba from scratch but found that i evidently didn't install gcc when i put this machine together so i can't compile the source. i'm frustrated now and i'm thinking about just swapping hard drives in the two machines. the one in the linux box is brand new so it should work fine. i've got a new drive ordered (200GB for $70 after MIR) that should be here today but it is just an ATA100 drive. if the one in the linux box is ATA133 i'll use it and make the new drive and external backup drive. then i'll just have to rebuild the linux box for about the 6th time. i'm getting lots of experience installing linux, anyway.

while all this is going on, the webserver is going to be ignored. maybe i can work on it some next week.