Customizing Your Folding Farm - Monitor your farm with FahMon
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I use FahMon to keep track of the machines I have folding on my home LAN. Setting the server up to allow monitoring by the external program required a little editing in a few areas.
First, I needed to be able to see the pertinent folders from Windows, so I logged into the server. This can be done locally or through a remote-access program such as PuTTY, WinSCP, or VNC. VNC is included in the install disk. I already had WinSCP and PuTTY installed on my machine so I used a combination of those two.
Using WinSCP, I logged into the server and found the SAMBA configuration file located at /opt/samba/smb.conf then right-clicked it and selected edit. WinSCP's built-in editor is a wonderful WYSIWYG that will allow one to manipulate Linux text files without the problems one would get trying to do so with a Win editor like Notepad. Of course, it is always a good idea to make a back-up of files you intend to edit. If you are going to use VNC, PuTTY, or go directly through the console of the server, then you might choose a text-editor like vi or nano.
SAMBA is a set of programs intended to make Linux files visible to Microsoft networks. It is already built into Fold-Server and loaded upon boot up; we just need to add a few lines to the configuration to allow us to see the folders we need to access from FahMon.
Scroll down the bottom of text file smb.conf, where we will add the following lines:
[foldsave]
comment = For EM3
path = /foldsave
browseable = yes
writable = yes
Save and exit the file and WinSCP will write the new data over the old file in the server. This may take a little time, depending on what's going on with the server and LAN traffic. Now, next time the server boots up, the /fold and /foldsave directories should be visible through Windows.
Once the server has been rebooted, there is one more thing to do before we can try to point FahMon to the folders in question. Open up Windows Explorer, go to My Network Places, Entire Network, Microsoft Network, and you should see a new group called Fold-Server, and the server itself, also Fold-server. Click on the server icon and Win will ask for a username and password (at least XP Pro does). Because of the way SAMBA is set up, using the root username will not work here, so use DSL and no password-this is a bit of a security issue, in my opinion, but unless you want to change the DSL password or add another user to the system and delete the DSL user (again, outside the scope of this article), then you're stuck with it. Once the server accepts your login, you should be able to see the /savefold directory and under that, /fold and a separate directory for every active branch computer should become visible. Once Explorer sees them, FahMon should be able to see them when you browse to add a new client for monitoring.
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