A cloud in a plug - brilliant

Seems that you could make your own private Dropbox-type environment with this, no? I know it wouldn't have all the features of Dropbox, but it could function as a private 'cloud' with the ability to selectively share out public URLs.

Very interesting, I'm curious to hear the impressions of someone what has spent some time with this.

One thing to note for you hackers out there, I believe the TonidoPlug (in contrast to the Marvell dev version) has covered up the mini-usb serial connection. It's probably still there, you'd just have to punch a hole in the box to get at it.

Looking at the website, it seems that the SD slot is covered as well.

Personally, I use my marvell plug with debian on it, installed onto a 2GB SD card, along with a USB NIC to act as a firewall for my network.

Another thought... I still have to punch a hole in my firewall and forward some ports to the "plug", right?

The product I'd like to see is a managed consumer-targeted router device. It would be a wireless access point, firewall, and home server all rolled into one. You'd buy the box and then pay a monthly fee for management. The software would upgrade itself so you wouldn't have to worry about manually patching security holes. The configuration would be easy to use and contain lots of templates like, "I want Skype to work well on these machines, so open up these ports" Oh, and you can plug in a bunch of external hard drives and serve up their contents via all sorts of protocols. Perhaps this exists and I'm entirely unaware?

I don't get it. The site (www.tonidoplug.com) touts all sorts of ways one can share his desktop computer with the world. Presuming that the desktop computer is on the network, why would a software-only solution not be sufficient? I understand the home NAS use case, but that's a well-solved problem already. The author of the zdnet article touts how great the "plug" would be for education, but why wouldn't someone's old PC running Ubuntu be better (or at least good enough)?

Oh, look! It's a computer IN A PLUG!

I will likely get this to compliment my aging NSLU2.