Simple, Cross Platform P2P File Sharing via 802.11b?

apago asks: "I travel alot on business and always need to exchange files with other people. We are always trying to figure out the best way to link two or more PC or Mac systems together. I carry regular and crossover cables and a small hub. Even then everyone has to configure a temp. IP address or have someone running a DHCP server. Most of these people have wireless 802.11b capability. Is there a way to share files between OSs using 802.11b without having to configure a temporary network setup? The autodiscovery and configuration of Bluetooth and ZeroConf sound like a good start. I like the easy of use of P2P apps." Does 802.11b need a TCP/IP stack to work? Could a low-profile stack, designed around ease-of-use, be used instead (all you would need to connect to the network would be the SSID, for example)?

Comments

APIPA is your friend

[Gruturo]

Ever had one interface configured as DHCP but (due to DHCP unavailability) found out that it automagically picked an address in the 169.254.0.0/16 range?

That's APIPA (Automatic Private IP Assignment) kicking in, newer M$ and Mac OSes (dunno about Linux, never had one configured at the wrong end of the DHCP protocol :-) ) automatically pick an IP from that range (with the last 2 octets derived from the MAC address, I guess), so that if you have a number of computers networked together, know nothing about IP and of course don't have a DHCP daemon running, they will just see each other, saving Microsoft and Apple customer support a phone call.

So, provided that you have to swap files only between Win98+, 2000/XP or MacOS, just leave everything on DHCP and in a couple minutes the windows boxes happily start spamming out advertisement SMB packets and will eventually see each other.

My 0.02