I have a complicated question that I'm hoping someone can help with.
Essentially I need to run NetBSD (or possibly Yellow Dog Linux), OS X 
and OS 9.

Here is my setup:

iMac 500mhz
120G IBM internal IDE drive
2 160G Maxtor external Firewire drives

What I want to do is run all three OSes for different tasks.
And I want the two 160G firewire drives to be usable on all three OSes.
The firewire drives have data that I would like to be able to share with 
a laptop running OS X on the LAN.  That can be accomplished via NFS or 
ftp.  But I also need to have access to the firewire drives in all three 
OSes.

Does someone here know how to accomplish this?  What filesystem should I 
use on the firewire drives?  I want the firewire drives to be available 
for making backups too, so that if something happens to the internal IDE 
I can have a backup on the firewire drives that will keep any metadata 
that OS X will add to, for example, an MS Word .doc or my Mail prefs.

Thanks in advance,
Jeff

Jeffrey P. Hergan, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
Saint Xavier University
Chicago