Hi Richard,
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 05:27:13PM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> The WinXP machine no longer reported a disconnected cable.
> The Jessie Mate machine now reported it was attempting to establish a
> connection.
>
> IOW both machines recognized a PHYSICAL connection.
> *NOTHING MORE*
>From what I can gather of the thread, both of your machines have
gigabit interfaces. That's good as it means the Auto-MDIX feature is
virtually guaranteed be supported¹. So, you need not worry whether
your cable is crossover or not.
All you need to do now is statically configure both machines to be
in the same IP network. It does not really matter what numbers you
choose as long as they are valid, but convention dictates that you
should use one of the private networks as listed in RFC1918:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
As you are only going to have two machines on this network you could
a /30. In fact given there won't be a default gateway host you could
probably get away with a /31. But there is no need to make life
confusing: you can just use a /24, so your network has use of all of
the last octet of the address, e.g. 192.168.1.*.
So, let's say you did choose 192.168.1.0/24. Just configure one
machine as 192.168.1.1 and the other as 192.168.1.2 with a netmask
on both of 255.255.255.0. If either of them insists on needing a
default gateway you can just put the IP of the other machine there.
Your Debian machine is probably saying that it's "attempting to
establish a connection" because it has detected that you've plugged
in an Ethernet cable that has carrier (has the electrical properties
of a working Ethernet network), and is now trying to automatically
configure that interface with DHCP.
That's most likely going to fail because you don't have a DHCP
server on your "network"—unless you *did* happen to have a DHCP
server running on one of those two machines.
Since this setup is very limited and isn't going to change, I would
just statically configure the network on both machines. Setting up a
DHCP server would be just one more thing to learn.
Once your network is working you can use the same tools that you use
over the internet to transfer files over your local network. So,
things like scp, sftp and so on. If your purpose in direct
connection is to have a secure link that needs no encryption and
you're satisfied that it needs no encryption², then you could get
faster transfers with tools like netcat.
Cheers,
Andy
¹ Auto-MDIX is OPTIONAL in the 1000Base-T standard so it is possible
that some gigabit NIC would not support it, but I have never seen
one that doesn't, even really cheap ones.
² A lot of times just because you have a private link between
machines still wouldn't make it safe to ignore encryption, because
if the cable goes somewhere where you don't have 24/7 vision then
it's trivial for someone to attach something that passively sniffs
it. But, it sounds like this is a setup in the home where that is
perhaps too paranoid.
Cheers,
Andy
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