I put a desktop PC in there because it’s also going to be my recording studio. The problem was getting on my local network– I didn’t want to run 75 feet of cable, and it was going to take a few days to order a wireless NIC. So I came up with a quick slick hack to get connected using a wireless laptop.
There are all kinds of bridging howtos all over the Internet so I’m not going to repeat them. This is a pretty good howto: Creating a bridge device. Give your bridge device an IP address that matches your network, and that is the default gateway for the other PC.
Another bit of good news, I bought a USB wireless NIC and it works perfectly. Total plug and play, and the new PC picked up all of its address and server information from my local DHCP server like it is supposed to. I got a Rosewill RNX-G1W for $20 from Newegg, which uses the Realtek 8187 chipset. It comes with an antenna, supports 802.11b/g, WEP, WPA/WPA2, and it is small and cute.
I also bought a batch of 2GB thumb drives- at $6 each. Six bucks!! Younguns, I remember the first gigabyte hard drive way back in the last millennium, and it cost a few hundred dollars. This is amazing. Which reminds me- why do some PCs still have a floppy drive, and does anyone use them?
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