At home we
usually want to share digital photos or music files. The evolution of file sharing
has progressed from the original ???sneaker net?????”passing files back and forth on disk
walked to and from people??”to enhanced sneaker net with CDs and DVDs, to connecting
computers with serial- or parallel-port data transfer cables, to sending files
as e-mail attachments, to setting up local file sharing from one computer to the other
(Project 3), and finally to building our own file servers.
Sending files as e-mail attachments seems kind of a silly thing to do, especially
within the same household??”it??™s horribly slow (worse if you use dial-up), and if your
e-mail service limits the size of file attachments, you may not be able to share the file
at all. Setting up sharing of local computer resources is fraught with security risks and
requires both computers to be up??”which is not very efficient or eco-friendly because
of all the power consumed. Certainly you can build a file server??”using your normal
desktop operating system or a server OS??”but this gets expensive because it consumes
yet another PC and more energy, an additional software license, and the maintenance
hassles of configuration and security. Unless you are well versed in networking, operating
systems, and cross-platform data transfers, file sharing with local computers and
servers typically only works between the same type of computer system: PC-to-PC,
Mac-to-Mac, or Linux-to-Linux.
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