Home Networking Cross Platform

[Fixed_Rider]

Hello,

I am hoping one or more of you guys and gals can help me out.

How can I set up home network across all of our devices?
I want to use our iMac with it's external HD as a NAS as our new Actiontec C100a's usb port appears to not be active.
We have the below listed computers running multiple OS's.
T43 Win 8
T61 Linux Mint
T61 Win 7
X61 Win 8
iMac OS X Snow Leopard
Gateway Laptop XP Pro

The goal of this exercise is to swap files when needed share the printer hooked up to the XP Pro machine, but mostly stream video.

Thanks for any and all input

[jdk]

Take the Thinkpad that is used the least, and physically connect it to the router. This will give you a 100MBps connection. Assign it a static IP address (probably the last next to last IP in your subnet) and connect the external USB drive. Install FreeNAS on the machine and format the external as UFS2. Now you will use SAMBA to share the device out over the network. Put it in a closet and forget about it.

802.11g has been fast enough in our home to stream even HD movies from the fileserver.

[ThinkRob]

Assuming your fileserver hardware is relatively modern (something in the last five years, 4 GB of RAM) I would *highly* recommend ZFS over UFS2, if only due to the former's excellent error correction abilities.