First post, by Hamby
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I have a couple of old HDs from my old HP laptop, 100gb and 160gb iirc. I've used them as external drives for my Acer netbook.
It just occurred to me... could I connect them to a Raspberry Pi ZeroW, and use them as a file server for my retro computers? This will include everything from an HP 200LX to 286, 486 and K6-2 systems. Even a Radio Shack Model 100 using a TDD emulator.
I have an old wired/wireless router, and I have RS232 to wifi adapters, as well as ethernet to wifi access point adapters. So I could connect most anything to wifi.
The only reason for using a ZeroW is its tiny size; combined with two notebook HDs the unit might be a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and therefore portable (or transportable, at least). It should be just powerful enough to act as a file server.
The other question is, what would be the best way to serve files? Set up an FTP server?
Yes, I could just run a file server on one of my current era computers, but 1) I don't want to bloat them with serving the retro computers and 2) I want to firewall these systems from the retro systems so that my retro systems can't be exploited to access my main machines from the internet, but I want to access the internet from the retro systems, and under strict controls access the retro systems from my main systems. Best of both worlds would be to be able to place/retrieve files on the zeroW server from my main systems, do the same from the retro systems, and in that way transfer data/files between the two networks... hopefully fairly securely.
Or is this idea pointless or ineffective in meeting my goal?