Backing up with Time Machine via "Personal File Sharing" and Airport Disk

I've been using Time Machine on my own Mac at home and want to use it to backup other Macs in my house as well. Right now I'm just backing up over FireWire, but plugging my disk into each of the other Macs one at a time doesn't seem to make much sense.
Besides going out and buying a Time Capsule, Leopard Server, or Xsan, what are my options for backing up multiple Macs to one disk? I've read that using an Airport disk is somewhat risky because of some "premature file transfer confirmation." Has anyone ever used Time Machine w/ Airport Disk and had problems?
I've also noticed that you can back up to shared drives, like if I share my current FireWire disk so people can back up to it, but wouldn't that require for people to connect to the host Mac manually via Finder? And wouldn't that in turn defeat the purpose of automatic scheduled backups?
Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

the only supported option besides Time Capsule is to back up to a hard drive directly connected to a mac running leopard on the same local network. as you mention it would indeed require that this drive be mounted first. you can automate mounting this drive on login and simply keep it mounted at all times. to do that mount the drive of the host Mac on a remote mac and while it's mounted there add it to the login items in system preferences->accounts.
You can also use drives directly attached to an airport extreme base station. that works in the same way as backups to a Time capsule.
Message was edited by: V.K.

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