Mounting one linux machine on to another

Question

I have 2 ubuntu desktops at my work place. I want to mount the newer system, sys2 on the old system, sys1.

Both the system's have cifs installed.

I can easily ssh to my new system,sys2 from my old system,sys1 but, I want to mount the remote machine(sys2) both via command line and also with GUI. Can you guide me with steps needed for the same.

Hope to hear from you guys.

Thanks

Answer 1

From our short conversation below your question I think you need a combination of several techniques:

• getting your files to sys2
• remote-controlling sys2 while physically sitting in front of sys1
• optionally: sharing the workload between both systems

As getting too deep into each of these would hit the boundaries of one question, I only point you at some ressources and after that you might come back with new questions on details of them.

getting your files to sys2

there are various solutions to this problem:

• samba/cifs (share the folder on sys1, mount it on sys2 - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide / https://askubuntu.com/a/101037/555486
• sshfs ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSHFS )
• nfs ( https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/network-file-system.html )
• syncing (as in replicating them using tools as rsync, syncthing, etc pp - please just use some search engine to find help on those)

which one you would like to use in the end is totally up to you, each has its down- and upsides. for example cifs, sshfs and nfs are slower all the time, while replicating will take some time, but calculations should afterwards be a lot faster than using a network-filesystem.

remote-controlling sys2 while physically sitting in front of sys1

to control a linux machine from another there are some different options as well:

• VNC/RDP/some other form of graphical remote desktop protocol
• remote shell/terminal protocols (SSH, RSH, Telnet)
• job scheduling systems (which are overkill on your two systems setup)

VNC - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC RDP - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/xrdp SSH - you already seem to know about that RSH/telnet - well, stick to SSH if you not that already

Fazit

Well, thats mostly it: get your files to sys2 and execute the jobs there. Afterwards transfer your results back.

Optional workload balancing

Depending on the type of workload you might find solutions to use both systems to do part of the jobs:

• distcc (can divide the task of compile huge programms to several machines)
• distributed computing projects at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects (just fyi)

If I yould know more about the actual tasks you want to load onto sys2, I might be able to help you find a fitting solution to sharing the workload on both systems.