You could think about smaller drives than 18 GB, too, and might get away with
much cheaper.
There are also other free or cheap FTP programs, and there is SAMBA. I have
SAMBA set up on our Solaris box (the VnmrX host), and it's nifty for drag & drop
file movement between NT & Solaris. It makes a Unix box broadcast like an NT
file-server under the SMB protocol. It's free, and you can learn about it and
download it at www.samba.org. I don't know how secure it is, but there are
passwords and permissions specifiable. No tarring would be necessary. Samba is
available for IRIX. You'd need something else to accommodate the Mac users,
though. I imagine that there are similar utilities for Mac, but I don't do much
on that side anymore.
You could also get them to work up their data off-line. As a .edu site, you
could probably get a site-license for some PC/Mac-based processing program
pretty cheaply (Acorn's NUTS, Tecmag's MacFID, ACD/SpecManager, ???)
Also, you could get them to phase & base-line correct their 1-d data properly,
save the spectrum in JCAMP, then use ACD's SpecViewer on their desktop to do any
further analysis. (Again, free.)
One thing, Hummingbird's eXceed has been mentioned a couple of times. I don't
know what academic pricing is like, but for industry last time I was looking, it
was EXPENSIVE compared to the competition. It is a very powerful suite of
X-windows and other applications, but you pay a bunch.
Lots of ways to skin this cat.
Have fun,
Patrick
Patrick Wheeler
Isis Pharmaceuticals pwheeler@isisph.com
2280 Faraday Avenue phone: 760 603 2409
Carlsbad, CA 92008 fax: 760 929 0036