CentOS 7: Home Networking

CentOS is a lot smarter than you might expect. It knows when it is connected to a home router. The new firewall quickly adjusts and generally does the right thing.

However, it won’t automatically allow you to link to the other computers on your home network. It’s defensive by nature and pretty tight. Once you tell the firewall things are okay for this or that, it will relax just a bit.

Let’s say that you have at least one other computer on your home network running Windows. This is not about Windows, so you’ll have to research how, but your Winbox can share files and any peripherals attached to it with your CentOS 7 machine (start by reading this for XP/Vist and this for Win7). The nickname for the protocol Linux uses to talk to Windows is called “Samba” which is taken from the abbreviation SMB (server message block). By default, it’s likely your CentOS machine is running a Samba client. It simply needs permission from the firewall to use it on the home network.

In your main menu, find the system administration tool for the firewall. It will demand your root credentials. The window that will open is pretty complicated, but we only need to worry about one thing: In the window pane on the left, select “home” — it’s the zone of operations CentOS knows comes from home networking traffic. In the window pane on the right, scroll down to find “samba-client” and select that box. The firewall immediately opens that channel for traffic only inside the router network.

Now test it by opening your file browser window. Look for something that indicates the Network connections and click that. Find the icon for Samba shares. Click and it should offer you a list of the Windows networks. By default, Windows computers will be set up to use “workgroup” as the name for this. Click that icon and you should find a list of Windows computers within that default workgroup. If you attempt to connect to any Windows “host” listed there with whatever name you gave it when you set it up (like “winbox”), you’ll need a name and password for any of the accounts on that machine. You can have your file browser window remember the password so you can log on at will. Once logged in, you can browse the file system as if it were your own on CentOS.

I’m not going to detail here the chase to find printer drivers for Linux; it’s pretty complicated. CentOS 7 comes with most of those available. You can find more at this page. Also, note that several major printer manufacturers have begun offering their own special Linux drivers, so do your own research. So let’s assume for now you know you have a Linux driver for a printer connected to your Winbox.

When you run the printer setup tool on CentOS, one of the options is a network printer using Samba (SMB). Click that option and fill in the information as required for your Windows Samba share. This assumes you’ve set up things on your Winbox to share and have given the printer share a simple name — I used “winprint.” Thus, it was a simple matter of smb://winbox/winprint for me. Then I chose the appropriate driver and set it up using the tool on CentOS. I was able to print a test page in just a couple of minutes.

The key was simply getting the firewall to open up for the samba client.