I use HD Tune or PassMark's DiskCheckup for monitoring internal drives from time to time.  However for your question on external drives, I think it depends whether or not the external USB drive controller supports SMART reporting as mentioned in this threads:

http://www.passmark.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1007
http://www.hddlife.com/eng/help/5_Troubleshooting/5_FAQ.htm

Western Digital Passport and IO drives seem to support SMART reporting as mentioned in this commercial product:
http://ariolic.com/activesmart/usb-smart.html

Patteo - glad you were able to sort things out.

You may want to see if your Linksys router has this feature that I have found and used on a business level Netgear router.  The router allows to assign a specific IP address if it sees a specific MAC address from a wired/wireless network card.  For example, router assigns DHCP and wireless card set to get IP address automatically.  Each network card has a unique serial number / MAC address.  You put that MAC address in the router and tell it to reserve/assign a specific local IP address so that anytime that router sees that network card request for an IP address it always assigns the same one.

If your router does not have this feature then you would have to keep on changing your laptop's wireless card to go between specific vs. dynamic IP addressing.  I use NetSetMan, the free version (http://www.netsetman.com) to keep network profiles so I can switch between specific and dynamic ip addresses for the wireless and ethernet network card on my laptop.

The main thing you need to do is called port forwarding from your router on port 82 to a specific computer where your mini webserver is.

Look at the following site: http://www.portforward.com
This shows you how to do it for common routers.

It basically involves going into the router settings and telling it that any incoming requests from the internet on a specific port get redirected to a specific local ip address. In your example, people would refer to your web server as {external ip address}:82
Your router sees that port 82 was requested so it forwards the info to the mapped local ip address 192.168.1.100 where your web server resides.