21 Oct
2006
21 Oct
'06
3:59 a.m.
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.