When you install Linux, you're installing a powerful server-capable operating system, but for security reasons most of the services are going to be switched OFF by default.

Services you can run include a web server (almost certain to be Apache httpd) and a file system server (probably Samba). You'll also be likely to enable FTP and some form or remote login.

How services are started / configured varies from one Linux distribution to another, but services are known as daemons (from Greek Mythology) and are started EITHER through scripts in the /etc/init.d directory on startup (if they're services that will be consistently and heavily used) OR through the xinetd daemon which monitors many possible connections and starts up services "as required".

The services are often run by the following daemons
 httpd for the web server
 smbd for file sharing (Samba)
 in.telnetd for telnet
 sshd for secure shell
 in.rlogind for rsh
 in.ftpd for ftp

If you want to use these services on a Windows system you can use processes such as:
 Explorer to contact the web server
 Any software that accesses a net drive (Samba)
 telnet to contact telnet
 PuTTY to contact sshd
(see http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)
 rcp and rsh to contact rlogind
 ftp to contact ftpd
And there are lots of other windows clients available too.

If you're sharing network drives on your windows box with the network, you can access the drives from your Linux system using smbclient; if you're running a web server on your Windows boc (IIS, Apache httpd or another) then you can access that from the Linux system using a wide variety of browsers such as Mozilla and Konqueror


See also Starting and stopping daemons on Linux

Please note that articles in this section of our web site were current and correct to the best of our ability when published, but by the nature of our business may go out of date quite quickly. The quoting of a price, contract term or any other information in this area of our website is NOT an offer to supply now on those terms - please check back via our main web site

Web Application Deployment - Services and Regular Jobs
resource index - Deployment
Solutions centre home page

You'll find shorter technical items at The Horse's Mouth and delegate's questions answered at the Opentalk forum.

At Well House Consultants, we provide training courses on subjects such as Ruby, Perl, Python, Linux, C, C++, Tcl/Tk, Tomcat, PHP and MySQL. We're asked (and answer) many questions, and answers to those which are of general interest are published in this area of our site.