I like the effort they go through in the comment thread to discuss the performance, power draw, etc. compared to a VPS. For instance, a VPS appears to draw 56 watts per user, while the SheevaPlug plus disk at high load draw only 20 watts; a pretty nice power savings.
"Please note that TonidoPlugs installed on our network have the torrent functionality disabled, as it is a violation of our AUP to download torrents via our network."
Sigh. I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes. I like to transfer free software and creative commons licenses work using Bittorrent; I should be able to do that on my own server, and if they want to charge me for the bandwidth usage, that's fine, but they shouldn't just ban it outright. Also odd that they don't actually mention this on their AUP http://pluggr.info/#tos but they do seem to forbid running IRC servers for some reason.
I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes.
I understand your perspective, but coming from the other side, I can tell you for a small ISP operation it can be a major PITA worrying about lawsuits and other potential issues related to users doing things on your network that draw the wrath of content owners. I don't limit bandwidth or protocols, and I've gotten a few notices of boxes that were hosting copyright content, but it's more overhead and hassle that you don't need to deal with.
When I first saw this, I felt gutted. Having quickly record the coating whilst waiting for this pathetic ryanair flight get boarded, I feel better knowing I have just got a fantastic deal on my VPS. Won't mention the company here unless asked to, cost is just £10/ month.
eh, a 32GiB ram 8 core G34 opteron with 4 disks is going to eat around 150 watts; that's a lot of 512MiB VPSs. The shevaplug/disk setup will definitely get you better I/O performance than the VPS (hard drives share... poorly.) but as far as power goes, the VPS, on modern hardware is going to win.
A lot of enterprises could store all of their non-image/multimedia data on a single 160GB server. This could be particularly true of illegal enterprises.
A bunch of SheevaPlugs connected to 2G or 3G wireless could be used to host a distributed low bandwidth "darknet" against the wishes of a local government. A simple peripheral with a mercury switch and a very limited UPS capacity could hold a symmetric encryption key for the hard drive. Movement of the physical device could trigger the erasure of the encryption key, requiring human intervention to restart, reformat, and reconnect the SheevaPlug to the darknet.
* 2G or 3G wireless would be attached to someone's account (i.e. associated with a person).
* The authorities could just access the contents of the drive to see what is on it. (though this would obviously mean infiltrating the darknet)
It would probably be easier to setup something like this hooked into the internet at some private business. Stick it under a desk or above the ceiling tiles and just plug it directly into the local network. That way they would have a hard time proving who put it there (unless it was hooked into something that required special access.... but even then if you could gain access without being one of the people that has access, it would throw them even further off your 'trail').
2G or 3G wireless would be attached to someone's account (i.e. associated with a person).
Easily solvable with shills or shell corporations. Think about the options of the authorities in the US. Police would have to get a search warrant. Which address are they going to get a search warrant for? The shill/shell company might have nothing to do with the whole thing other than maintaining the 3G accounts.
The authorities could just access the contents of the drive to see what is on it. (though this would obviously mean infiltrating the darknet)
This might also mean infiltrating the organization to get access to the darknet. This would seem to indicate that the level of physical security I'm suggesting is commensurate to the task.
It would probably be easier to setup something like this hooked into the internet at some private business. Stick it under a desk or above the ceiling tiles and just plug it directly into the local network.
That's exactly what I'm thinking of! That would be another viable option for hosting such a device.
Shell companies will have people on the board as well. If it was that easy to have a corporate cover for a an illegal business there would be many more than there are today.
Drug trade and other illegal stuff is 'cash only' for a reason, you don't want a paper trail.
And places that hand out IP numbers to unknown MAC addresses should get a better network administrator.
What are the use cases for this device which are not covered by either (1) an EC2 "micro" instance ($82 up front + $0.007/hour * 3 years * 365 days * 24 hours/day == $7.38/month) or (2) a small form factor server in my home? If we ignore the toy/coolness factor of having such a small form factor device, are there any compelling use cases? I can't think of any.
Well, the advantage being that your home connection probably isn't the same, plus you don't have support people whose job it is to keep your home server up and running.
e.g. Say you're away from home, need something off the server, and it goes down. With this, you can call support and probably have it up and running again.
I get the need for a local server if you need low latency/high bandwidth and/or lots of storage. However, for what percentage of those use cases would the user not be happier spending a bit more for something beefier? Why is the form factor so appealing? Even those in a NYC studio could find somewhere to stash a larger server. If the device is being used to serve media, it will have a bunch of external drives dangling from it anyway.
The managed vs. unmanaged question seems important but mostly orthogonal to locality and form factor. And, Dropbox has proven that the local/remote Hybrid is valuable (along with management). Although the form factor is novel, I don't think it's significant for those who only care about the benefits of a piece of technology.
Maybe the world needs more managed services for the individual/household? I posted a "Tell HN" a few months ago about my desire for a managed router, so I guess I've already made this claim:
Possible use case: If I can put a bigger hard drive inside this, it would be a nice personal mini "mozy" backup service for me. No, it wouldn't be terabytes of stuff, but the dedicated connection would be worth it.
a sheevaplug with it's own sata disk is probably going to have less CPU than the amazon 'micro' (at least if their setup is anything like mine, which it likely is.) but disk shares very poorly. If the sheevaplug comes with it's own sata disk, it will kill any shared disk solution as far as disk performance goes. (on the other hand, it's not RAID, which can be pretty bad.)
For the $140 setup fee, I better own that SheevaPlug after I discontinue service... I would feel pretty ripped off if I didn't, and they just handed 'my' SheevaPlug to the next guy that was paying the $140 setup fee.
Looks like Tonido (the maker of the hardware) is looking to get directly into the hosting business, at the somewhat ridiculous price of $20/month:
http://www.tonido.com/tonidocloud_what.html
I thought this was going to be a joke, and that actually you buy a Sheeva and plug it in at home. I don't think you can yet buy connectivity so cheaply, but if you consider it as a fraction of your existing connection... + electricity cost per month.
Of course, there are advantages for managed, off-site servers. And I applaud http://pluggr.info for kicking it off. It may not be the ideal deal, but it may (who knows?) exactly suit some niche, well enough, that's big enough - and that is all that matters at this stage.
I think businesses would go more for not owning the Sheeva, and instead paying less, and also getting automatic "free upgrades" when the next performance level comes out (in the next 3 minutes.) That's a different organization of costs and finances for pluggr.info, which probably doesn't suit them (yet), but which I think would be more profitable both for them and for (business) customers. But if you got a niche, you got a niche, and you've gotta start somewhere! I hope these goes well for them.
I wouldn't bother with this at the current minute. I purchased a SheevaPlug Colocation off Pluggr a couple of days after this was posted.
I was told it would be set up on the Friday after. Didn't happen. UPS lost some shipment items in the post.
I was told it would be set up soon. Last Saturday comes round and AGAIN, UPS lost the shipment. They then said that they were going to use FedEx instead now.
Received an email this morning saying that they can't install my plug because there's no enough room in the data centre and are now sending me the Plug and external HDD through the post, which is probably fair. I'm still wondering WHAT the hell I'm going to do with it using my ridiculously slow internet connection.
I think the offer is a bit too good to be completely true. Maybe in a few months, when they're earning a bit more money, they can offer more services but until then, I don't think you're going to have much luck. It looks like they've disabled the order form anyway.
A side-question, but does anyone have recommendations about where to buy a Sheeva or Guru plug in the US? (The primary seller I can find[1] has a perpetual 4 week wait for all items, and that worries me.)
Being subject to non-torrenting, non-IRCing AUPs and other such nonsense would seem to negate the chief advantages of something like the SheevaPlug. If you're familiar with linux server configuration it's not any big deal to keep your plug at home.
If you're running a commercial web site with many users then obviously the SheevaPlug would be a poor choice, but for things like hosting your personal web site or blog it's perfectly adequate, and unless you make a complete hash of it maintenance is extremely minimal.
I've been looking for a 1TB drive connected to one.
I'd probably also want eSATA, since the hardware supports it, and you get way better speed, and way less cpu usage.
The no bittorrent, and no IRC turn me off. Why should the provider be messing around with the data coming in and out of my network? Both I've HAD to use on occasion on my servers. I do understand that it would reduce the amount of bad activity happening on their networks though.
I'm still bookmarking it for next time I want to evaluate hosting providers.
In the comments someone mentions BuyVM and their VM setups with 512MB RAM, 2 CPU cores, and 50GB space are just $6.00/mn. It seems to me that's a much better deal.
Has anyone else had experience with BuyVM? It seems really quite inexpensive.
I only use a BuyVM VPS it to run a cheap (15 usd/yr) VPN that allows me to do things that usually are restricted to US IPs . I bought it as a replacement for another VPS I have, but I was too lazy so far to complete the setup, so I can't guarantee for it.
Their VPS boxes "come with the ability to run OpenVPN, PPTP, GRE and SIT tunnels by default".
I've had a harder time setting up the traffic forwarding than I did on a XEN box, but I'm not particularly good with VPN technologies...
In general, the whole process was pretty painless...
An interesting bonus: They have a pretty active IRC channel
"Setup Fee" should be changed to "Purchase Fee" for clarity's sake. The setup fee of a typical webhost is for configuration (plugging in, making accessible to the world) exclusively.
> Just get that node.js chat server running on your sheevaplug...
> nowadays there are many new architectural iterations of IRC.
Are you saying this would prevent DDoS's or are you stating this as a 'sneaky' way of getting an IRC server installed that the hosting provider might not notice.
I'm still reading up on this, but I'm very curious as to the tradeoffs between this and a Linode or Slicehost or other VPS system. Seems this would have the advantage of a lot more capacity, and while I'm not sure of the performance of the CPU it should be essentially guaranteed. If you just keep it for a year, and consider the $140 for the plug a total write off, this comes to about $16 a month.
Is this a good deal compared to VPS offerings? It seems like it would have to be, unless the CPU is very slow.
Amazon micro instances are close, but you can't run a web service from them since they can lose their CPU for seconds at a time (as I understand it.)
You're a better man than I. The first thing that popped into my mine was a room full of daisy-chained power strips.
I wonder what people are going to do with this. Reminds me a bit of the day when the Mac Mini was coming out, and immediately a lot of colocation offers were coming up.
Well, according to some RiscOS programmers I once knew, ARM assembly is quite pleasant, one of them even preferred it to 68k. So let's see what people can eke out of a system like this.
ARM Assembly (with the exception of TDMI) is an absolute dream compared to 68k, Sparc, MIPS or x86. Instructions are fixed to 32 bits so everything (in theory) should line up nicely, the predication functions are way better than using flags and cmp-type instructions and the pipelining is much better.
Having said that, I wouldn't want to write a web app in ARM asm, I'd much rather use Python or Ruby.
From the site http://pluggr.info/#ps
"Please note that TonidoPlugs installed on our network have the torrent functionality disabled, as it is a violation of our AUP to download torrents via our network."
Sigh. I know why they do this, but I will not host on a network that forbids a protocol just because some people use it for unsavory purposes. I like to transfer free software and creative commons licenses work using Bittorrent; I should be able to do that on my own server, and if they want to charge me for the bandwidth usage, that's fine, but they shouldn't just ban it outright. Also odd that they don't actually mention this on their AUP http://pluggr.info/#tos but they do seem to forbid running IRC servers for some reason.