Wow; $192 for a 5.25" floppy disk drive

[Ray Arachelian]

Jules Richardson wrote:
> If the device is the 'server', what's to set up? Plug it in, give it
> an IP address (method to be determined), fire up the client software
> and talk to it.
Exactly!
> I'm of the same mind there. I expect nearly everyone who will want
> this can easily rustle up a DOS / Unix / OSX / whatever system, but
> Windows is more problematic for some of us.
Nah!  Samba works beautifully.  As does a USB port and formatting or
mounting a FAT32 drive from under Linux.
> That was the reason for my question about DHCP; I've almost
> exclusively used static IP addresses for anything I've ever set up
> (mainly because most of the time they've been servers), so my
> knowledge of DHCP is lacking.
>
> I can't think of an easy way of doing that initial device
> configuration in an Ethernet world, though; DIP switches and the like
> requires a lot of them, but any other configuration seems to require
> some other form of interface to 'kick start' the initial config.
Simple enough.  Don't try to build a specialized device.  Reuse normal
hardware and use something like Linux or FreeBSD.  It has all that stuff
built in.  Support for Ethernet, USB, FireWire, TCP/IP, DHCP, FTP client
and server, HTTP client and server, NFS client and server, Appletalk
server, Samba, FAT-16, FAT32, etc.  And the best part is you don't have
to spend 6 months to a couple of years reinventing the wheel just to get
that side of the project going.