Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS | Hacker News Reader

Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS

paulstamatiou.com

116 pointsPStamatiou50 comments

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.

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

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>

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.

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

Tell you what: have at it if you'd like. But if you build a business around it and make millions of dollars, do send me one of these :).

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

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.

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.

It would be pretty trivial to get Fuse - http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon - installed on the SheevaPlug, which would give you a mountable "directory" to your S3 account which you could then share on your local network.

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.)

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).

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...

"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.

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

BTW, it's touted.

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.

Which one is that, btw? I've been sticking to my guns of WRT54GL's forever with DD-WRT, but now that N is more mainstream I'd like something new, that also has usb ports for some NAS goodness.

I have a http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N16, which I bought mostly because it has a whole lot of RAM (and flash RAM).

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried hooking up an external drive, I just don't have any reason to believe it won't work.

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.

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...

It works great on my laptop.

Sheeva have plugs with eSata now, I got mine from newit.co.uk.

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...

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

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

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.

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

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.

Check out the GuruPlug [1].

[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...

> 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.

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.

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

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?

Google X10.

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

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

You would probably enjoy watching WWDC 2010 Session 205, "Simplifying Networking Using Bonjour". Bonjour is a service discovery protocol built in-part with small headless devices in mind which is something you might find interesting in and of itself, but there's also a brief introduction to a small Bonjour enabled wall-wart which allows for power to be controlled and monitored remotely as well.

http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2010/

New applications, I don't know. But we can decentralize the old ones again: e-mail, web hosting, file sharing… We just have to fix our crippled upload, and use SRV records for HTTP[1].

[1]: http://www.anta.net/nic/draft-andrews-http-srv-01.shtml

I fear there is a chicken-and-egg problem, however. Without a decent upload, few will host themselves. Without self-hosting, there is no incentive to give upload to people…

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.

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

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

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

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

Also crashes safari on iPhone. What gives?

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 :)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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