what kind of network should i have?

[harofreak00]

alright, i want to become more a computer nerd that i already am. here is my setup.
1 desktop computer running xp pro on an athlon 550 with 200 gigs of movies and songs.
1 laptop running xp pro on an athlon 1800 with basically nothing on it
1 desktop in a closet running redhat linux 9.2 on a super old dell optiplex system (pII 266, 20 gigs, 64mb ram, etc...)

all these computers are networked together on an 802.11b+ wireless network. i know the basics to most networking, but i bought the dell just to experiment around with linux and see what it can do. if you have any thoughts, that would be awesome....

what is the coolesting thing i could do, put a huge hard drive in the dell and make it an ftp server?

 

[jbob]

all these computers are networked together on an 802.11b+ wireless network. i know the basics to most networking, but i bought the dell just to experiment around with linux and see what it can do. if you have any thoughts, that would be awesome....

what is the coolesting thing i could do, put a huge hard drive in the dell and make it an ftp server?

1. cool item #1 - if you wanna haul any of that 200gigs worth of video and music across your wireless, then ditch the 802.11b stuff and upgrade to the faster and far more secure 802.11g with wpa (wi-fi) support. It will be backwards compatible with your b stuff so you can gradually upgrade it, and forward compatible with the new 802.11i standard as well. And it will be much harder for any hacker drivin' down your street scanning for poorly protected networks to get in...

2. cool item #2 - could make the dell an ftp, mail, web, dns server too, just depends what you wanna do and who you want to have access to it. Linux is a great learning environment for the geekdude command line types like me...if something goes wrong and you can't recover, blow it away and start again...


Just some thoughts and have fun...

Jim