Home network backup solutions?

[Bill and Jan Klemme]

Hello folks,
I am considering using Fedora and have downloaded R.8, but done nothing 
else yet.  Is there any email list I can go to that uses language more 
newbie-friendly?  I have no clue what you people are talking about...the 
terminology is super-proprietary and without a dictionary or years of 
experience I am totally lost.

BTW I am not computer-illiterate.  My working career was IBM mainframe 
tech support.  I am still lost in here.  With all respect for what you 
all seem to know,  I need to go somewhere else to learn about this OS.  
Any suggestions?

Additionally, reading these emails has given me the thought that I may 
have to become a Systems Programmer again just to keep my teeny desktop 
running.  Not an attractive proposition at this stage of the game....

Thanks in advance,
Bill K
PS  This post is the most familiar-sounding of any I have read today....

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Reid Rivenburgh wrote:
>> Hi.  I have a small network at home consisting of one wired, always-on
>> F8 desktop (mine), a roving Mac laptop running OS X, and a rarely-on
>> Windows XP laptop.  The laptops are wireless.  I also have a new 500
>> GB external hard drive that some of you may remember.  The Mac user
>> was thinking about getting a drive for herself to do backups using
>> Time Machine or whatever Apple's backup app is.  But we figured there
>> ought to be a way to backup to my desktop/hard drive.  I looked around
>> and found BackupPC.  It sounds like it'd do the job, if I could figure
>> it out.  (I'm having trouble discovering the Mac on the network
>> [doesn't respond to nmblookup], and I have a feeling if I can get past
>> that, I will have additional trouble getting rsync or tar to work
>> there....)  I thought I'd check here to see if there's anything else
>> out there that would work.  Ideally, it would be transparent to the
>> clients, automatic when they're on the network, incremental....  You
>> know, um, everything BackupPC does!  Free and open source would be
>> best....
>
> If it is your network you shouldn't have to 'discover' it. The simple 
> fix is to configure your dhcp server to always give the same IP 
> addresses to the same MAC addresses and then either put the addresses 
> and names in the backuppc's hosts file or set up local DNS service. 
> There shouldn't be any problem running ssh, rsync, or tar on a Mac. 
> Many people on the backuppc mail list are backing up macs, so ask 
> there if you run into any problems.
>