Just an Airport Extreme N base station. After a few small problems, I hooked it up to the network on one side and to an USB hub on the other, and it’s doing great. It’s nice not to depend on the desktop machine being up to share the drives and printer.
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osx
mac
network
It shares them as AFP shares and as Windows shares. The printer sharing works better than sharing the printer using the computer for some reason – An HP PSC 2400 that didn’t really share properly from the main iMac desktop is now attached via USB to the airport and it shares perfectly with 3 machines I’ve tried so far (two OSX 10.4 and one OSX 10.3).
I installed the new Airport utility on two of the machines (because it only supports 10.4). But you don’t actually need it except for the initial Airport configuration (and if you have one of the new Macs with N-upgradable wireless). A nice thing it does though is that if a drive becomes available it lets you know that it was attached to the Airport and prompts you to mount it (instead of having to go to the Finder’s network folder).