Help children by helping me

[darkknight]

Hello, I'm new here and I have little to no knowledge of setting up servers. I'm part of a charity that is building a library in a developing country. Unfortunately, the area has no internet connection.

We plan on using a hard drive full of downloaded books and resources(it's all legal and donated). Someone told me I could use the hard drive as a proxy server, but I'm not sure how that would work.

The library is expected to have approximately 30 netbooks with an XP OS and one more powerful computer run by a librarian that we'll train. If anyone could point me to resources explaining how to set up a central server connecting all the computers and the hardrive, and the materials needed to do so I would be grateful. I've been looking online, but have been unsuccessful.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

[jasonyo]

the easiest way is using MySQL, a free server program designed to make your personal computer a web server for your website. check it out. if you figure out how to totally set it up, do tell me, as i have spent many hours trying to figure it out with no luck =[

[cg1]

MYSQL is a database server not a webserver,
an easy way would be to get a wifi router (and wifi cards if the netbooks don't have them built in) to connect all the computers together on a local area network. Then using windows file shareing you can share the harddrive or a folder on it (if your sharing ebooks you might want to set it to read only so they cannot be delete or changed except rom the main computer)