and you might actually prefer the DMZ way - see the link on that page. You may want to become knowledgeable about port forwarding and DMZ and firewall before you do this.
So, sorry, DMZ = De-militarized zone. Think about Korea, which is the place where you usually hear about DMZs. The DMZ is the strip of land that is monitored by both sides but isn't occupied by either, in between the US/SKorea line and the NKorea line. The idea of a DMZ for a router is basically that the router can pick one computer and essentially fully expose it to the internet. The advantage is that it's much easier to set up than port forwarding. The way it works with Apple's routers is that you turn on DMZ, specify a DMZ IP address (something outside the DHCP range -- so it would never get randomly assigned by the AEBS to a new client ... typically something like 10.0.1.201, whereas all your clients are normally 10.0.1.1-10.0.1.100). Then, instead of using DHCP to get an IP address on the computer you want exposed, you set the computer to manually obtain an IP address, namely the one you specified as the DMZ. Then, any incoming calls on your public IP address go straight to that computer.
This
can in principle be dangerous, because attack calls from the outside can now reach that computer. But if you either have your services turned off or use a firewall, the danger is essentially minimal.
Only one computer can occupy the DMZ of a network, I believe, which is also a consideration. But it simplifies configuration/
Whichever computer(s) you want to be able to SERVE files have to be exposed in this manner (i.e. if computer A is in its DMZ and computer B is
behind the NAT, like a normal client, on another router, then B can ftp to A, but A cannot ftp to B).
I know that this all sounds fairly complicated, and I have to say that, honestly, this is
not a beginner / intuitively obvious process, even with Apple hardware. That's actually a significant part of why things like Windows Live Foldershare excite interest -- besides the fact that they live sync folders, a lot of these programs can automatically use advanced techniques to bypass the need for port forwarding.
I do kind of agree with
Cromulent, also. This will be fine if you're going to just do nightly file transfers (i.e. let the two computers transfer overnight), although it will waste rather a lot of electricity just to get a file transfered. Sending HD's back and forth is a good option. If you usually only have a few gigs of data to send at a time, even DVD-R's are not a bad option -- in the US, postage for one of those in a mailer is not too bad -- maybe just $2.
