Home network 101: How to get 3 Macs to feed photos off the same external HD

Question

This has to be a super simple setup but the search I did reveals a lot pf pieces to the puzzle but not the basic idea.
I currently have three Macs running 10.4.10: an old iMac G3 500Mhz, an iMac G4 1Ghz and an iBook 1.4Ghz. They are all connected via generic ethernet cables (RJ45) I installed throughout the house to a Lynksis BEFSR41 EtherFast Cable router in the garage. That one is then connected to a Motorola SB5101 cable modem for our internet connection. Each computer lives happily by itself at the moment and when I need to transfer something from one to the other I temporarily turn Personal Sharing On, do the transfer and then turn it off again. So Sharing is Off 99% of the time because I read that even though they all have passwords, this is the safest way to keep them.
One problem that we are facing more and more is that four people in the family use these computers and we each have downloaded pictures in iPhoto on all computers. This creates a bit of a mess so I would like to have a central 500GB hard drive next to the router in the garage that would host all the iPhoto files and be permanently visible by each computer.
I read that the new Airport would offer this possibility. However, I am not interested in wireless because I have already run ethernet cable throughout the house. So my questions are these:
- What is the best way to accomplish this scenario in terms of safety, speed and cost?
- Ethernet cable is still safer and faster then wireless, correct?
- I will be replacing the old iMac G3 with a new 24inch intel one as soon as they are introduced, hopefully this week. Would this old G3 one be useful as a server that the 500GB drive would be attached to? Or would its bus speed be so slow it would bring iPhoto on each machine down to a crawl? It wouldn't really be doing any work, just sit there with the 500 attached to its Firewire port so I can add it to the Lynksis chain.
Is the Lynksis now too old and slow to allow 3 computer to access that HD at firewire speed? If so, what would be a better choice?
Again, the three key factors and speed, safety nd cost. (But then again that's always the case, isn't it???) I really appreciate any help or redirection to existing threads or articles that I might have missed.
Thank you very much.
Bo

Answer 1

Not likely...
They'd need your Passwords & Usernames, then your Router would have to Forward Port 548 to a particular machine, then the icing on the cake is that almost all of this is being done by Bots looking for Internet Explorer running from Drive C:\ and an OS that can execute .exe, .pif, .com, .bat, .etc. files!
So, if your Macs & Router aren't set up to allow you access from the outside world, nobody else can either... if they are then it's still very unlikely someone else could, but if you want to be as anally paranoid as me, then...
ClamXAV, free Virus scanner...
http://www.clamxav.com/
Little Snitch, stops/alerts outgoing stuff...
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
HenWen/Snort combo, that is a free MAJOR Firewall...
http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/henwen.html
Then the venerable old Brickhoues/Flying Buttress Firewall...
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/downloads.html
WaterRoof is a firewall management frontend with bandwidth tuning, NAT setup, port redirection, dynamic rules tracking, predefined rule sets, wizard, logs, statistics and other features.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23317
But really... no need to worry yourself YET with a Mac... I once challenged a group of people that poo-pooed Mac Security, by running a Machine as Root, gave them the IP, and a few more hints, and nobody got in at all. (There weren't many attempts though).