

Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/review-99-tonidoplug-linux-home-server-nas

======
CRASCH
It seems like they stretching the definition of cloud a bit.

What happened to the cloud, it is almost meaningless now. I should say it
means everything, which has no meaning.

It is like the new version of Multi-Media. It has pictures and text so its
Multi-Media.

I'm going to go play on my personal cloud Multi-Media gaming platform now.

~~~
Raphael
Right, with cloud services, the customer never touches a server and may not be
aware of the nature of the servers being used.

~~~
loup-vaillant
_That_ is the true nature of cloud computing: lack of understanding (easy to
use) combined with unconditional trust (they hold your data, after all).
<sarcasm> But putting it this way tend to spoil the hype. </sarcasm>

------
IgorPartola
As the article mentions, these are all built around the SheevaPlug
(<http://plugcomputer.org/>). I guess there is enough of a market that these
are becoming more and more popular to build and sell. My idea with these is
basically a local+cloud storage hybrid: you attach a local drive via USB, but
then connect it to AWS and use that as the main storage area. Then the local
drive is simply a very large cache. The appeal is that you get "infinite"
storage with the speed of a fast NAS drive.

~~~
PStamatiou
Igor, I love that idea of a large AWS cache!

~~~
nissimk
Check this out, it's a commercial version of that: <http://www.nasuni.com/>

~~~
IgorPartola
That's it. Except, the model I had in mind was more of a device + software
thing. Also, it looks like the product is cool but $300/mo for this? Yikes.

~~~
jnoller
Well, the Nasuni product is aimed at the business, not personal users. There's
a variety of cloud-gateway products aimed at home/personal users.

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adamsmith
I'll be doing cartwheels once someone gets ZFS working on this, so I can plug
in a bunch of USB hard drives through a USB hub and share a pool over the
network.

(In the mean time, I have a Dell box doing this for me, though it was hard to
set up. It took hours of debugging to figure out that OpenSolaris would crash
until I disabled the second core/SMP. Then, it took hours to find out that the
network crashed randomly due to a driver bug, and to find the right hotpatch
off a random forum thread.)

~~~
skolor
I'm not sure how well you would get ZFS working on it with so little RAM,
although it may work better on OpenSolaris.

On the other hand, I've got an Intel Atom processor, running with 1gb of RAM,
and it runs ZFS reasonably well on FreeBSD. Mind you, this does have a _much_
larger footprint, although it does have some advantages (mine has 3x sata
ports built in, plus a pci and pcie port for more if I wanted, plus a dual
core 1.6ghz processor). It was only marginally more expensive ($80 for the
board/processor, $15 for the ram, spare PSU and case).

------
jzting
It works alright for file sharing and it's nifty to be able to start torrents
remotely.

I was hoping for it to become a Dropbox replacement, but unfortunately file
transfers are pretty slow over WebDAV. I was thinking of hacking up something
with rsync so it would work more like Dropbox (synced local copies). Has
anyone tried anything like this before?

[http://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-
source...](http://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-source-
dropbox-clone/)

------
ojbyrne
"While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard
drive or printer on the network, they are costly and rather limited in their
functionality."

My router cost $92 and supports 2 usb attached devices that it will share via
SMB. And I run DD-WRT which deals with the limited functionality issue.

Not that this thing doesn't look cool or useful, but that one sentence seemed
inaccurate.

~~~
PStamatiou
I think it is fair to say that this statement still stands true for all other
non DD-WRT capable routers. I have used some horribly crappy routers that
touted their USB expansion as a huge feature.

edit: pre-caffeine typo fix

~~~
ojbyrne
I was making 2 separate claims - a. cheapo routers can use external drives to
do NAS and b. there's lots of functionality available for cheapo routers via
DD-WRT.

------
brown9-2
Anyone happen to know of similarly priced options for SATA drives? Have a few
extra laying around I'd like to put to use as cheaply as I can, currently
don't have any desktop PCs to plug them into.

~~~
spicyj
Presumably you could get one of those and use it with a SATA to USB adapter,
like this one from Monoprice that I have:

[http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&c...](http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10315&cs_id=1031501&p_id=5189&seq=1&format=2)

It works great on my laptop.

------
pistoriusp
I've got something called an Xstreamer
(<http://www.xtreamer.net/xtreamer/overview.aspx>)

It's a really simple media playback device. It has a network jack and a Wi-Fi
module. But the really great part of this product is that you can plug in two
external drives via 2x USB ports. You can also install an internal 2.5" drive.

And those drives are shared across my network via SMB.

The company also appears to have a fairly large open source development
community and openly promotes people to hack their hardware:
[http://forum.xtreamer.net/mediawiki-1.15.1/index.php?title=X...](http://forum.xtreamer.net/mediawiki-1.15.1/index.php?title=Xtreamer_Source-
code&section=3)

They have a NAS product as well - Which allows you to install "custom
software." I haven't had a look at it though.

------
Dirt_McGirt
Calling it a $99 NAS is stretching the truth a bit.

~~~
IgorPartola
I'm currently running an NSLU2 as a NAS and it works very well (can stream
1080p over a 802.11g network as long as nothing else is going on). This thing
is way more powerful and has much more RAM. The only downside: no second USB
plug for two powered drives set up as RAID1.

~~~
Titanous
You could use a powered USB hub. Not sure what the throughput would be,
though.

~~~
IgorPartola
I could, but the whole point of this is that it's no cables. Adding a powered
hub means having to plug it in. It's the kind of thing that is not a
limitation until you try to use the device in a tight space with only one
outlet.

------
10ren
> 1.2 GHz Sheeva (ARM)

OK, this is more powerful than my eee PC (900MHz Celera) - assuming clock
speeds have some legitimacy across cpu architectures. Not much storage, but
you can plug in a 4GB flash drive for $12.50 from the supermarket.

~~~
fhars
i've seen a review of the guru plug that claimed that for network workload,
this 1.2GHz ARM is not really faster than an ALIX board with a 500MHz AMD
Geode and two 100MBit ethernet iterfaces, while running so hot that you cannot
touch the ethernet plugs while it is idling.

[Edit:] it is the "Guruplug: don't waste your money" article that is the top
result if you ask google for "guruplug alix". And netxt time I buy a phone
with copy & paste support, I swear.

~~~
10ren
<http://1wt.eu/articles/guruplug-slow-heater/>

The heat seems to be a design issue - he mentions the bus being only 16 bits
wide. I'd hate to think ARM chips don't scale up after all...

Here's performance numbers from a "SheevaPlug". Seems about half the power of
an equivalent intel CPU, but its floating point performance is about 1/35
(like, really bad; no hardware FP). File serving isn't FP intensive though.
Around about a "P3 800Mhz".
<http://computingplugs.com/index.php/SheevaPlug_Performance>

The SheevaPlug was the predecessor of the GuruPlug
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug>

------
erikstarck
Just a thought: what if there were linux servers in every power plug in every
house? What new applications would be possible, if any?

Where can I buy USB sensors?

~~~
IgorPartola
Google X10.

~~~
pyre
Are you saying that these things have X10 hardware baked in? If not, that
would be really killer.

~~~
IgorPartola
I'm just saying that controlling X10 devices with this device would be a nice
hack.

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duck
Does anyone know when a wifi version of the SheevaPlug
(<http://plugcomputer.org/>) is coming out? This would be a perfect device to
off-load tasks like screen-scraping that you leave a noisy server on all the
time for.

~~~
lemming
Check out the guruplug, it seems to be the next gen Sheeva, it has WiFi
amongst many other enhancements.

~~~
duck
Thanks, but sounds like there is some heat issues with the guruplug:
<http://1wt.eu/articles/guruplug-slow-heater/>
<http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1735.60>

~~~
jlintz
They're shipping a fixed version in July to address the heat issues and going
to replace the current faulty ones. I ordered one in May but still haven't
received it. When I inquired about the status they replied about the heat
issue and they were in the process of rolling out a new design to correct it

------
irq
This link crashes my iPad every time I load it. Anyone else have a similar
experience?

~~~
PStamatiou
I'm using Google Webfonts to load up the Droid font, which non-iOS 4 Mobile
Safari doesn't like. iOS 4 Mobile Safari can handle it though :)

------
rwhitman
Just thinking it would be interesting to use in conjunction with an iPad /
iPhone, maybe extend some of the capabilities for file storage, local web dev
environment, etc

------
codemechanic
Create a distributed face book using Tonido p2p Platform will be cool? every
house will have a social networking device :)

~~~
fictorial
Like a laptop, desktop, netbook, or phone? I do not follow. What do you mean?

~~~
codemechanic
Run a distributed face book in your plug and then access from anywhere. The
plug is built for running 24/7. So it will be available always.

~~~
awad
Except if your internet goes down. Which happens to me often enough that I
only really pay for my service 8 months out of the year, the rest being
comp'd. Gotta love Cablevision. Also, what happens if/when, for whatever
reason, your node gets a flood of traffic? It can kill all your bandwidth,
since most people in the US don't have that much to begin with. And most
people would not think to pull the plug (heh pun) if that were to happen,
rather they would blame it on the ISP, I'd think.

But it's certainly a cool thought. I'd be more interested in it being used for
P2P file sharing, but restricted to friends. Like wirehog.

EDIT: It dawned on me that file sharing would take up a ton more bandwidth
than 99% of social networking. In either case, I suppose some software limits
could be set to throttle requests.

~~~
jzting
It would be interesting to be able to run your Disapora
(<http://www.joindiaspora.com>) instance on it...

