Introducing TP2 - Next Gen plug server that costs only a dollar to run 365 days | Hacker News Reader

Introducing TP2 - Next Gen plug server that costs only a dollar to run 365 days

tonido.posterous.com

111 pointslionking88 comments

Every time I see a device like this, I'm left licking my lips and pondering just how much small company infrastructure you could fit on one.

800Mhz/512mb RAM is more than plenty to provide Gmail-like full text search for 10-20 users, while $6/user/year ($199+$1 / 20) is much lower than the equivalent cost for Google Apps Enterprise.

All that's missing is a competitive free software stack to rival the likes of Gmail/Google Docs. With the right governance, a small team of developers might enable a huge, disparate network of devices like these, with centralized security updates, a sweet admin/user UI, and be functionally competitive with most paid "low hanging fruit" cloud services (storage, docs, mail, sharing, RSS reader, ...), while offering unique features of its own (e.g. meaningful PGP e-mail, before the message leaves the building, from a web browser).

I wish someone with the right leadership skills could attract talent to a project like this. Young developers these days seem content to reinvent web frameworks and bolster Google's coffers writing crappy Android hacks, compared to those of even a decade ago, who had multitudes of successful efforts attacking Microsoft's ecosystem on its home turf.

You should have a peek at what my former coworker William is doing with Heliotrope. Pretty nice email client that supports threading with incredibly fast searching. It's not exactly what you're looking for and it's still pretty raw, you have to be familiar with the command line, but it has a lot of potential. https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

I thought Heliotrope/turnsole weren't stable yet?

Personally, I've used his Sup client and it's excellent, searches are basically instantaneous.

I think you're right about the stability, but that's a better question for William to answer. Wasn't aware of Sup, I've only seen him using Turnsole (https://github.com/wmorgan/turnsole) which apparently is derived from Sup.

Both Heliotrope and Turnsole are derived from his work on Sup, from what I can tell.

His Rethinking Sup[1][2] blog posts were, as far as I can tell, the initial thought work that led to the creation of HT & TS.

Personally, I read them at the time with great expectations, and was a bit let down since it seemed to result in a email-specific system, whereas Sup-the-service was described as a generalist document system (RSS, notes, even IRC).

I'd try to contribute, but frankly I don't really want to delve into yet another language (Ruby) for now..

[1]: http://masanjin.net/blog/old25 [2]: http://masanjin.net/blog/old13

That seems like a poor allocation of engineering resources, because $200 + fully loaded costs of a sysadmin for an email server >>> $50 x users.

My thoughts are towards an appliance-like experience with minimum setup involved, more like installing a NAS, which the average Joe can manage nowadays without dedicated admin.

Of course things will go wrong, and there'll always be a need for support, but you can mitigate a lot with just software, e.g. pairing of bricks for mirroring, growing capacity by adding pairs, and supporting this through wizard-like UIs.

As for complicated failures, should they occur, there's always outside help (for which an ecosystem of its own might appear if such a software stack was successful enough).

You're looking for the FreedomBox project.

Same here; I would probably get one if I didn't already have a server to run at home.

I've been kicking around ideas for a fully distributed social network/communication/file storage system. It would only really work if everyone had their own always-on, publicly accessible server at home. I don't know if I have "the right leadership skills", but I'm definitely interested in making something like that happen.

Why would the server have to be at home? Why would it not be enough for everyone to have e.g. their own EC2 microinstance?

No reason that it needs to be at home, but:

1) Ease of setup for the non-tech literate. Someone could buy it, plug it in, and have it running with minimal fuss.

2) Some people don't trust their private data to 'the cloud.'

2) Some people don't trust their private data to 'the cloud.' Yet you'll put the data on the cloud via this appliance and just require a username & password to it?

No, ideally you'll send it directly to other people's appliances, and use public-key encryption where possible.

It seems one could use ssh keys similar to what Amazon does with AWS.

In addition to pyre's reasons, part of the point is to let people control their hardware, and to have better physical control of their data before it leaves the premises, e.g. encrypting email, as forgotusername suggested.

How did you approximate how much memory per user for full text search?

Well, I didn't. :)

Full text search needs little more than stack space to perform merges, but it runs much faster with a good chunk of RAM to cache the tips of posting lists. If you dropped an SSD into one of these, the requirement for RAM to achieve good performance might disappear altogether.

We have built almost our entire warehouse/fulfillment infrastructure on a number of FitPC2 boxes, which also draw about 5-7W with solid-state disks.

The unit police are not pleased: It draws only 1.2 Watt/Hr… Two offenses on this page.

There are better specs at https://store.tonido.com/index.php?main_page=product_info... , for instance, it has a gigabit ethernet in addition to the B/G/N wifi.

I also question what the hell is "Ghz level performance"? Especially when the CPU runs at "~800Mhz", obviously less than 1Ghz. Plus frequency is a crap way to measure actual performance anyway.

I took it to mean "at 800MHz, it performs on the same level of some chips that clock in at 1GHz", kind of like how AMD used to label their chips by "equivalent Intel GHz" rather than their literal speed. Like you said, clock speed is not really the issue.

It is Ghz performance if you round up to the nearest Ghz.

So if you've got $800K, does 'rounding it up' then make you a real millionaire?

They probably wanted to say 1.2 Watt-hours per hour.

Where I live, a watt-year costs about a buck so it would be $1.20 to run it for an entire year.

> They probably wanted to say 1.2 Watt-hours per hour.

I.e. 1.2 Watts :-)

Not here: the plural form of 'Watt' is 'Watt' ;-)

I've been on Globalscale's treadmill since the very first "SheevaPlug" release. It wasn't until 2 products later "Dreamplug" that they really worked out their heat and power problems.

I'm a bit worried that a device like this, crammed in with a hard disk is going to bring all that back up again.

Its great if its cheap to run 24/7, but it has to actually be able to do this without overheating and locking up twice a week to be useful.

I'm hopeful though. I've had great luck with $149 Dreamplugs as permanent home servers. This is cheaper and fits the hard drive inside. Nice.

With these on the scene, it becomes ridiculous to "turn that old desktop into a home server". That 100watt desktop will cost you as much in power in a year as just buying one of these, not to mention being noisy, large and ugly.

There's little heat waste to expect from a 1.2 Watt device. The hard disk bay lies next to the motherboard, not on top of it, also ensuring optimal dissipation.

> Unfortunately, we don’t have enough stock to meet the demand. So please order the unit as soon as possible at our online store

Interesting statement. If demand is so high and supply is so limited, price it higher. I'm guessing this is simply marketing mumbo jumbo.

Honestly? It sounds like they may have no stock and are waiting on pre-orders to size their first run (especially since they only have renderings of the product).

ObiTalk has the same problem. They were selling the Obi110 for $50 on Amazon and it was constantly selling out within minutes and scammers were buying them and putting them on Amazon for a lot more. Finally, they were able to produce enough to meet demand and then the scammers found they weren't able to sell them at the high price anymore.

There's reasonable reasons to want to price it lower. They don't want potential future customers to see a really high price up front and not come back and check later when the price drops. They may also want to find out what the real demand would be at that price.

However, it might be an interesting experience to auction off the first x units as a way to show the high demand and what people would be willing to pay for it.

> However, it might be an interesting experience to auction off the first x units as a way to show the high demand and what people would be willing to pay for it.

That's brilliant. Anyone know if this has ever been tried?

Google's IPO.

Albeit a bit different, Kickstarter tiered "products" are one way to test this...

It is a real product and it is in stock and shipping. For pictures see http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150335195698585.3...

You make it sound so simple. Perhaps they wish to sell more units rather than make larger margins. If their current production is incapable of sustaining current demand, it's perfectly reasonable to issue this statement and make people wait rather than raise the price. Companies do this all the time: Apple immediately comes to mind.

You aren't stuck declaring one price forever, immutable. If you're selling out your limited stock now and you want to make more later, set the price higher now, use the profits to make more with better economy of scale and sell them cheaper. Everybody wins. Leaving money on the table may sound noble, but it makes me wonder about the odds of the company being there tomorrow. Not that many companies are so generously endowed with resources that they can just pick and choose what they take like that.

I really hate these marketing craps.

Just give tech specs and price.If the suppy is so limited, after all items sold-old, take pre-orders for the next party...

I think it looks really interesting as a way to share files in a group. I can take my little NAS to a meeting and have people connect wirelessly and grab or share files with everyone else in the meeting.

It could also be a really great external hard drive, being able to put files on it wirelessly before a trip then grabbing it and heading out.

My question is, is there any possibility to run it off DC power, like from a USB adapter? So, could actually be used as an external hard drive? That would make it a great dual-use product.

Lastly, I wonder if you could install CrashPlan on it and use it as a CrashPlan backup respository? With a good 500GB drive in there, you could backup all your important data from all your computers onto the device, and in case of an emergency, just grab that one little box and run. Having an always-on, power-efficient backup would be awesome. Heck, you could even put one off-site at a family or friends house and backup to it over the internet to have your own off-site backup. Would that work?

You'd have to have clueful users or be really careful, because this ...

a way to share files in a group. I can take my little NAS to a meeting and have people connect wirelessly and grab or share files with everyone else in the meeting.

...seems like a really good way to spread malware, or lose confidential data.

Check out http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox for an easy NAS/file sharing setup

This line in their docs makes me a little less excited "Installing any other software on the TonidoPlug will void warranty" http://www.tonido.com/support/display/docs/Booting+off+USB+D...

Instead, you can boot off a USB or SATA drive and do whatever you want. http://tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=3625

Ahh makes sense. Thanks for the info :)

Nice! Low power usage is great, but I would like my data to be protected as well. Usually manufactures of devices like this are lacking in making sure my data is protected. After checking the specs I'm missing (for me at least) two basic requirements:

- please make use of https for logging into the device or using the apps on it. Lots of people use open wifi and are not using tunnels like the more technically crowd here on HN.

- Please make sure the device itself is fully encrypted. Devices of this small form factor are easily stolen and full disk encryption is at least making it harder for a common thief to end up with your personal data.

Without these measures I'm not really interested in using these devices for my personal use nor in advising others to buy them.

Personally I think the best use for a device like this is not as a media or small business server. The cloud is rapidly taking over all those functions and is easier to manage.

What a device like this could really revolutionize is the communication between what are now "dumb" devices. I could imagine this thing using NFC or Bluetooth to talk to your power meter, alarm clock, even your fridge. Instead of a whole wifi stack in each device just put cheap NFC chips in them and allow a small server to talk to the rest of the world. With the right third party ecosystem I could imagine one of these in every house.

I do not think you do fully realize what that N in NFC stands for. It is near as in 'centimeters'. I would not be surprised if someone cranked that up to miles by using a radio telescope at the other end of the connection and averaging signals over months, but I doubt you can get meters of range through walls in a package that fits inside your house.

Zigbee probably is the best bet for a wireless technology to use here.

You are talking SoC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip) right? I think most NAS you get for retail users are made by some of those chips. Also true for small home routers.

I still have the first-gen plug. It was fun to play around with for a weekend, but it's been sitting on my shelf for over a year and a half because I just couldn't find a good use for it.

So, I have pogoplug(which is cheaper), which is similar to this. Their software is really bad and it's get disconnected all the time, so I don't really get that cloud benefit I was expecting. I would wait to see review in some respectable site before I actually buy. As for price, I don't think it is as cheap, but I suspect they put good components in it. So if it is, as good as they claim, once people have it, if they say it is good, I would be happy to have one of these.

Here are usecases for me:

I need place to store backup of my pictures,

I would love to have something that would download torrents for me

Central place for text files and such that I use dropbox now, I simple wish more private place for it

Music, yeah if there is space, sure

Currently my PogoPlug is plugged in with two external HDs, has space for all my audio and ebooks, plus pictures, but like I said, it is flaky and I don't really use it as much because of it.

I really love some of ideas people suggested (forgotusername), I think there is business to be made there, as if my friends are having a device and can share with me stuff, I will get same device to be able to share and connect with them.

Check out arch Linux for arm at http://archlinuxarm.org/ They've got a really awesome walkthrough and several guides. Not to mention they are constantly updating and expanding the packages available. I installed it on my pogo and haven't looked back.

Hey, so I found that, I ssh into it and I only have busybox, when I ran pacman, it is not present. I guess I need to research how to install it. But I kind of left it at that.

Overall I would keep pogoplug services, I would like to add torrenting for example.

I like the price level of this thing. If can run as a wifi access point, that means in many cases (lots of people get the ethernet connection provided and use only wifi at home) you can get a wifi router + storage box for the price only slightly higher than that of a good device (WRT54G is 70$).

I like the future where I can buy a home storage+router appliance for ~100$.

One thing is true for this product is that the pricing per MB of RAM is cheaper than those on market. However most of them have 1.2Ghz or so processor and a 3.5" bay instead of 2.5", I really need some benchmark to tell. You don't want portability and 24/7/365 uptime with the same device.

Comparing eggs here, the closest you can get for something like this, say QNAP's, would cost 149 for a 256MB 1.2Ghz SoC stuff with 1 bay.

What most of us here would wonder, is what OS could we load into the system with adequate driver support, or just some firmware like tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato).

That's incredible what one can do with a watt! It's also incredible that the technology has improved so much in the last 18 months that the energy consumption has dropped to 1/4 of their first generation plug.

I'm in the process of installing a security camera system that's capable of recording to an NAS, but I don't currently have a computer at the location. This seems like it might be a inexpensive way of doing it.

It seems like it might even work for remote access to the stored video. Does anyone know what the security is like for the remote access? I presume it's making an outgoing connection to their servers to punch through any firewall?

Plug computers have interesting security implications:

http://blog.andrewcantino.com/post/3565673304/why-plug-compu...

Great. Another thing I don't need, but can't help myself from wanting.

Wait, what does this mean?

PERSONAL CLOUD SYNC - TonidoPlug2 comes with free life time 2 GB sync offering file synchronization without using the Public Cloud. Now sync is truly personal.[1]

https://store.tonido.com/index.php?main_page=product_info...

If I want to use it as my private Dropbox alternative I can only use it to sync 2GB of files even if I plug in my hdd?

A 2.5inch hard drive at idle draws around 3 watts.

What they are describing is less powerful than current generation smartphones.

It's an ARM cpu @ 800mhz, not x86 @ 800mhz.

Any word on what operating system support? Would love to use this for an RFID system if it would support debian or something similar...

It runs Debian Squeeze. You can also boot off the internal SATA drive for more options.

what are the use cases for these kinds of devices?

I just bought one. I want a computer that I can keep on all the time and be exposed on the public Internet. Instead of paying for a bunch of cloud services, I can install the software on this server and have "my own" Dropbox, radio streaming, static blog hosting, etc.

Another use case: RSS + torrent client.

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I have them running on a WD MyBook Live [0].

It also features an 800 MHz ARM. I does only have 256 MB RAM, but does a decent job so far. Couchpotato/Sickbeard + sabnzbd + transmission run fine. Timemachine backups also used to work fine, at the moment I have a little bit of a problem with them. That might be due to me hacking arround on the system too much though :)

[0] http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2011/03/20/the-western-digital-my...

Probably; it seems quite capable: http://tonidouser.com/doku.php?id=advanceduses:start

Some of the more popular ones: 1. Sync your files to the TonidoPlug, ala a private "Dropbox" 2. Stream your music whereever you are 3. Remote access to your files and photos

The hardware looks great. I've been looking for a replacement for my home server; My current favourite option is a second-hand Geode thin client with an external harddrive, followed closely by a mini-itx Atom or E-350, but this looks much tidier.

I'm a little cautious about the software platform, though. Is it possible to run ordinary Debian on these?

The TonidoPlug2 is running ordinary Debian Squeeze 6.0 with full apt-get support. And in any case, you can also boot the TonidoPlug via a USB or SATA drive and setup whatever you want.

Do you get access to the bootloader etc? They dont seem to be selling it as an open platform, so a bit unclear...

The process is a bit of a pain, but you should be able to do what you want following the documentation here: http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Installing_De...

http://www.tonido.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4101

Forgive me, but I feel like I am coming in the middle of a convo here.

What does this thing do?

They say it's like a pocket NAS that you can move anywhere and anybody can easily share files like Dropbox, but then it only comes with 512MB storage? So I am very confused.

Can someone explain in simple terms, what this does and why I (as a Dropbox user) might be interested.

Thanks.

That's 512 MB of RAM, not storage.

You could run FreeNAS (v7, not sure about later) on that. Not sure if it's worth it for a single drive device.

What does it do?

It's a headless computer, in a tiny form factor that sits on the mains socket, with a drive bay. You use it for whatever you'd use a tiny headless computer for. The low power requirements make "always on" acceptable; thus things like torrenting or file serving or etc etc are okay.

Compare this tiny low-power device running a Linux distribution for file serving with that old desktop - bigger, uglier, hotter, more power hungry.

Stick a External USB Drive or connect a internal SATA 2.5 drive into the bay first. http://www.tonidoplug.com/screenshots.html#galleria/img/toni...

Then you have access to all the files in those drives via the web browser or via iPhone/Android apps.

You also can sync your files to this plug device by installing a client software on other computers (much like dropbox) but your are files are always private and never stored on the cloud.

It has a 2.5" enclosure. It's basically a hard drive enclosure that plugs directly into the wall, takes little power, has wifi and ethernet, and custom software. It also has an SDK.

Ahhh...ok....that makes sense.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the obvious big drawback, which is that you still need to take care of backups.

A real game changer would be if a low power server came out with an integrated point and click solution to have the data automatically backed up!

Wow i've been looking at buying the Netgear Stora to use as a NAS but this looks much more impressive and energy efficient.

Only problem is, is there a UK version planned? it would be a shame to ruin it's aesthetics with an international power adapter.

Can you charge mobile devices with the USB port? And could you create a version that has a power outlet (like a MagSafe adaptor) so that I can use it as smart (i.e. storage, wifi-router) power adaptor ?

A couple of recommendations.. 1) mobile SDK for integration into third party apps, 2) Desktop app that integrates seamlessly with the operating system.

Knock those out and you could have a viable Dropbox alternative.

You can build your own mobile app or client via the HTTP API already available at http://www.tonido.com/oldsupport/Developer:Main http://www.tonido.com/developer/sdk/doc/reference/html/index...

For Desktop integration, WebDAV support is available.

The form factor does not look plug-like to me, and I do not see the actual plug. So, the question is whether this will have a separate power adapter, and if so, how large and neat that adapter is.

Here you go: http://www.tonidoplug.com/screenshots.html

That pleasantly surprises me. Also, the plug seems to be switchable for European variants. If that is the case, and the hardware can do 230V and 50 Hz, the thing would be very useful for travelers.

when you stick in a drive, it's going to be using a bit more than that

Yeah, there's no way it stays under two watts per hour if a drive (spindle or solid state) and wifi are running.

They are right, there isn't anything like the TP2 out there. Hopefully it will push other companies to be more competitive and make quality products.

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