Borgify our home office!

April 9, 2009 9:15 AM

What's the best way for my wife and I to merge our computing equipment such that we both have access to everything?

I'm interested in setting up some sort of print server and some sort of NAS-related device to make our home office more flexible and redundant. We have:

1 Mac Mini
1 PC Laptop
1 Laser printer 3-in-1
1 inkjet printer 3-in-1
2 unrelated and currently unused USB (IDE) harddrives
1 4port wired Linksys router(old. but still kicking)

We don't currently stream audio/video, so the NAS feature-set is really more focused on backup/sharing for the 2 computers.
Obviously, I'll have to buy SOMETHING to make this all work, but I'm interested in being efficient with my purchases. Has anyone faced this dilemma before and come out victorious? Can you help me wade through the masses of device reviews to pick the good stuff?

posted by specialnobodie to computers & internet (10 comments total)

An Apple AirPort Extreme plus a USB2 hub would let you share your printers and USB hard drives, plus serve as a wireless router for your Mini and Laptop. I think that would be a pretty cheap and reliable solution.
posted by wheat at 9:40 AM on April 9

Don't believe the hype when it comes to sharing printers over Apple wireless hardware. It doesn't "just work" and a lot depends on exactly what printer you have. If your printer doesn't have a driver that works out of the box, you'll soon find yourself poring over PPD files from the GutenPrint project and still perhaps getting nowhere.
posted by galaksit at 9:57 AM on April 9

Get a printer that actually plugs into a network by itself. Like galaksit says, it can be very difficult to work with one through an adapter.

I have a Brother 2070N laser printer that easily works with both Mac and Windows machines on my home network. It's hard-wired to the switch and I print to it from wireless laptops. Brother, in my experience, is good about providing drivers for more than just Windows, and the drivers generally work without any twiddling.

For file sharing we're a mostly-Mac household, so I just connect directly to machines through the Finder to access documents. We have a time machine backup of the laptops, but no other "centralized" file store. I enable FTP sharing from the Macs for the benefit of the Windows machines. SMB sharing is ridiculously slow.
posted by odinsdream at 10:41 AM on April 9

My experience with apple products has been nothingbut good, but for a great printer, scanner solution with ECXELLENT customer service, get a cannor printer. I have a Cannon MP620 multifunction printer, and it can print and scan wirelessly from multiple computers.
posted by lukeklein at 11:07 AM on April 9

Many NAS boxes these days come with a couple of extra USB ports on them so that one can plug in extra drives. Some of these NASs can use the ports for print sharing. Conceivably, one more box, plugged into your router, could connect your printers and your extra hard drives to your network.
posted by bonehead at 11:30 AM on April 9

If the printers don't already have network support, I suspect you'll have trouble sharing them as anything but printers using a NAS or other device. It might work if you hook them to one computer or the other, provided that the printer maker provides software for sharing the other functions over the network.
posted by Good Brain at 12:18 PM on April 9

I'm not sure if it's cool to answer your own question, but after some further googling, I ran across the MSI Wind PC. It requires purchase of a CF card and memory, but those are both cheap. Sounds like others have had good luck installing FreeNAS as the operating system, followed by a print server. It's a bit of a higher-effort solution, but it seems like the most flexible.
posted by specialnobodie at 1:50 PM on April 9

Wow---that's no more expensive than a NAS enclosure. I'd say go for it. The only downside to me is that it doesn't appear to do hardware RAID-1.
posted by bonehead at 2:24 PM on April 9

As a much delayed followup, I've been fighting with this off-and-on. The NAS part was pretty easy. I was able to get it hooked up to both a linux and a Mac machine. The printserver part has been much more difficult. I haven't yet succeeded with that part. Further, I think there are some more reasonably priced off-the-shelf NAS/printserver combos on the market now.
So, I guess the theory was better than the execution. Whether that was due to me or due to the theory, I can't really say. :)
posted by specialnobodie at 12:18 PM on October 19

I ended up buying a QNAP ts-219 a few months after you asked this. It does everything one could ask for, but it was rather more than you spent. I've been very happy with it though. It's a rock solid little box.
posted by bonehead at 9:58 PM on October 20