Josh Kendall

I’m sitting in my office at 7:50am on a Saturday morning messing with the server trying to get it setup for remote access from home and I realized just how crappy the area I’m working in is network wise. I have internet through a cable provider which means my setup is a Motorola cable modem and a Linksys WRT54G. The wireless works great and everything in general is fine, however since the office space is rented I had no choice in where the was installed at in the room. It’s inconveniently located very close to the phone and fax lines which means there’s a lot of cables in one area. My desk is also in this area and with a monitor, laptop, USB hub and 4 external Iomega Prestige drives means even more cables. Oh, and the new local server is currently sitting on my desk since it doesn’t have wireless and it’s the only place I can put it without running a network cable across the room either around the base board (very long cable) or directly across the floor (foot traffic + cable = tragic early demise).

So I had this thought, actually thoughts; what if I buy a Airport Express Base Station, plug my server into the network port, my USB hub (with hard drives) into the USB port and move the entire thing across the room. It would let me move my desk to anywhere I wanted and I can easily move the server and hard drives to another spot if I need to later. The internet and fax could stay where they are and there would be less cable clutter in one location.

The only problem I have is that I don’t know if I can plug the USB hub into the base station and still access my drives as easily as I was. One is a time machine drive so I know that will work. Does anyone know if this idea of mine will work, or should I look elsewhere for a solution?