Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS

June 28, 2010

Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? 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. It was this dilemma that had me pondering a custom solution when I wrote my series about building a cheap and small mini-ITX-based computer with the sole purpose of being a NAS and download box. That setup cost over $200 and required much hardware and software tinkering. For those looking for a cheaper and hassle-free solution, I would suggest the $99 TonidoPlug linux home server, NAS, cloud-in-a-plug… et cetera.

TonidoPlug and cables unboxed
TonidoPlug unboxed.

The TonidoPlug falls into a relatively new category of “wall-wart” form factor computers. They are generally defined as being cheap, low on power consumption (in the single watts range) and fanless. Most plug computers, as they are also called, are based off of the Marvell SheevaPlug reference design. The difference between the TonidoPlug competitors like the Ctera CloudPlug, PogoPlug and Globalscale GuruPlug comes down to the bundled software and services. While they all essentially run on the same hardware, each has its own set of pre-installed applications in addition to services (some are paid) that do things like facilitate file and media sharing from outside the home network.

Tonido bills their offering as “an alternative to cloud services and storage.” I think Tonido is going after some stiff competition with services like Dropbox and Amazon S3 for file storage/syncing and countless other cloud services for every niche imaginable, that don’t rely on cheap commodity hardware that has a much higher chance of failing compared to aforementioned cloud services with SLAs. But I digress; for what is essentially a $99 network-connected Linux box, I couldn’t resist taking a look at the TonidoPlug.

Hardware

TonidoPlug Linux Home Server and NAS closeup

At roughly the size of the last-generation Apple Mac Mini (the new version of which is slick as heck) power brick itself, the TonidoPlug comes with a 1.2GHz Marvell Feroceon processor (ARMv5), 512 MB of DDR2 RAM, 512 MB of flash storage (Hynix NAND using JFFS2 according to dmesg), a gigabit Ethernet port and a single USB 2.0 port (Marvell Orion EHCI). Sorry, no Wi-Fi in this plug computer… though the updated version of the Marvell reference design includes 802.11b/g, bluetooth, a 2.0 GHz processor and built-in hard drive.

TonidoPlug complete setup with external Western Digital hard drive

As for power consumption the TonidoPlug has been said to draw approximately 5 to 13 Watts though I cannot confirm without a Kill-a-Watt meter handy. The fanless design is silent at the expense of being warm to the touch, neighboring on toasty when performing a rather large apt-get update. Overall, the TonidoPlug is a nice, simple server I can hide anywhere, such as right on my power strip.

TonidoPlug Linux Computer plugged into a surge protector
The TonidoPlug nestled away in its natural habitat — the majestic power strip.

Assuming the TonidoPlug is always running near its load (only likely if you were to do something like fold on it 24/7), it would cost $1.42 to run for a month in California (15.22 cents per kW-h according to the DOE).

Software

Like its ilk, the TonidoPlug does not include any sort of monitor or display connector. As a network device and server more than a desktop, the plug computer is meant to be accessed through a web interface (or SSH if you prefer… or you can setup VNC if you must). The underlying operating system on the TonidoPlug is Ubuntu 9.04, but seeing as how users have access to SSH and apt-get (though it is broken right out of the box) this can be user-updated whenever necessary. This is where Tonido shows off what it can do. CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store. Tonido has a well-documented developer platform and SDK out for this purpose. That being said it appears they are still in the early stages of fostering this developer community and the only applications out are ones written by CodeLathe.

Before delving into those TonidoPlug web applications I’ll talk about setup. Hardware setup doesn’t really warrant a mention — just plug it in, attach an Ethernet connection and USB storage device, be it a USB stick or external hard drive. Software setup is almost as easy. Find the local IP of your TonidoPlug on the network by going to tonidoplug.com/ip then access that in your browser; the URL is usually something like http://[local IP]:10001.

TonidoPlug Hardware Setup Wizard

After changing the root password (you use also this for SSH access later on if you so choose) you will be prompted to create a Tonido account. This account is vital to accessing your TonidoPlug outside of the network by simply browsing to your easy-to-remember Tonido URL. That’s pretty much it for setup.

TonidoPlug registration with TonidoID
Creating a Tonido profile with tonidoid.com lets users easily access their TonidoPlug remotely at http://[username].tonidoid.com

There are two main UIs for the Tonido. There is the admin interface that provides control and lets you see the status of hardware, network and storage, and then there is the primary interface for managing applications. You’ll spend most of your time in the latter.

TonidoPlug Admin interface
TonidoPlug Admin

At this point, without any further configuration you can connect to your USB drive on the network. Samba is pre-configured and already running. WebDAV support is also available, but after setting up the included WebsharePro application. This brings me to the next point: applications. Currently the TonidoPlug comes with a slew of applications:

TonidoPlug Dashboard - Simple View
TonidoPlug Dashboard – Simple View
  • Explorer – Manage your files from anywhere
  • Torrent – BitTorrent client
  • Workspace – Personal Information Manager and Group Collaboration Application
  • WebsharePro – Share files and photos directly from your desktop
  • OpenID – Use your Tonido URL as an OpenID provider
  • Photos – Share high resolution photos easily and securely
  • Jukebox – Listen and organize your music wherever you are
  • Money – Personal Finance
  • Thots – Personal Journal/Blog
  • Search – Search your desktop and files on your USB storage
  • Backup – Backup your files to your private cloud
TonidoPlug Application Dashboard - Advanced View
TonidoPlug Application Dashboard – Advanced View

Below are a few screenshots from some of the applications:

Tonido Jukebox
Tonido Jukebox
Tonido Money App
Tonido Money App
Tonido Torrents App
Tonido Torrents App

Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that all of the included applications would never replace my current usage of other services or applications for their respective utilities. The Tonido apps are all minimum viable products at best and do not compare to other feature-rich web or desktop applications. Even if these included TonidoPlug applications were up to par with other competing cloud services, I would not trust my daily workflow on a cheap piece of hardware that could stop working at anytime and that relies on a home Internet connection that is just as unreliable. The main draw of the TonidoPlug is the Tonido service that lets users access these applications and their files remotely, outside of their network but in the end that introduces another failure point — the home Internet connection. That’s where the Money and Workspace-like apps make no sense to me. On the other hand I have no problem using the TonidoPlug to serve up local media files and the TonidoPlug’s ability to stream media to UPnP and DLNA compliant devices like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are enticing.

So what do I like?

I could expand on my thoughts but there’s no convincing me otherwise. If I am to use a so-called cloud alternative to store my files it would not be in the form of a $99 piece of hardware. I have become far too used to happily relying on robust cloud services like Amazon S3, 37 Signals web apps, my own server for OpenID purposes, WordPress for blogging, desktop applications uTorrent/Unison for downloading and so on. In short, I already have something that does each of the things better than the Tonido apps are meant for. There is one big exception though. Tonido has an app store and more useful applications and innovative TonidoPlug uses could emerge based on new applications.

However, the TonidoPlug is still valuable to me at the moment, despite my disappointment with the applications. Why is that? It’s a $99 linux computer that is perfect for small projects. For example, Scientific American asked some MIT and CMU students how they would use such a cheap and small server. There are some great ideas in there from home automation to remote video surveillance or anything really:

8. You name it:
Because SheevaPlug uses the Linux operating system and open-source software (both of which can be downloaded for free), it could be a cheap Web server, a source-code repository, a backup server or countless other things. “In general,” M.I.T.’s Hutchinson says, “it would be possible to host a lot of different types of services on such a box.”

Verdict

TonidoPlug NAS setup with external Western Digital hard drive
2TB Western Digital My Book Elite hard drive not included.

For $99 I would recommend the TonidoPlug to any hardware and software hacker looking for another platform to tinker around with. I’m already thinking about using it to control an RFID reader and some software to manage a door solenoid lock in addition to sending out access alerts via Notifo. However that would be made much easier if this had Wi-Fi built-in like the updated reference design.

The TonidoPlug gets 8 out of 10 Stammys for great value for a small Linux server, not so much for the bundled apps. I will be keeping an eye on Tonido and its app store to see when things change for the better.

What would you do with a TonidoPlug? Would you buy one? Do you currently own any similar network devices or tiny servers?

Paul Stamatiou runs on the Genesis Theme Framework

Genesis Theme Framework

Genesis empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Whether you're a novice or advanced developer, Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.

Take advantage of the 6 default layout options, comprehensive SEO settings, rock-solid security, flexible theme options, cool custom widgets, custom design hooks, and a huge selection of child themes ("skins") that make your Genesis site look the way you want it to. With automatic theme updates and world-class support included, Genesis is the smart choice for your WordPress website or blog.

102 comments … read them below or add one

  1. Interesting. I would use it for the same purpose. I wonder if it’s hardy enough to act as a VPN server (LT2P)?

  2. Noah Gibbs says:

    Looks awesome. As for what I’d use it for — monitoring my non-home web apps! You just need cron and wget, and you can monitor uptime and responsiveness as measured from your home connection.

    You could also host hobbyist projects on it. 512MB of RAM is what my Linode has, and it ran my Rails projects back when it was more like 350MB, too. So you could run a fair number of Rails apps via Passenger, if you wanted to. Not bad for $1.50/mo.

    I’d love to use it as a source repo, except that as you say, it’s not going to be hugely reliable. Source code repositories need to be either very reliable or backed up to multiple locations. Though it’s less of a problem with git, since your checkouts are already full repos.

  3. Erick says:

    Needs one more ethernet port – then it could be made into a firewall – that would be sweet. An extra usb wouldn’t hurt, either.

  4. steve says:

    Doable to plug a usb hub onto it?

  5. Brett says:

    Thanks for the great review Paul. This is a pretty interesting idea and I will be looking into possibly purchasing one soon. :)

  6. It’d be nice to have two or three of these with independent net connections and storage, but using MogileFS so that you could get around any concerns over an unreliable net connection or cheap hardware. http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/

  7. Nitin says:

    I wonder if you can run Asterisk on this as cheapo home VoIP PBX.
    Have an auto-attendant/voice mail, find-me type services and other cool PBX features.
    Connect out to a VoIP provider and make really cheap calls.

  8. Dirt_McGirt says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  9. IgorPartola says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  10. IgorPartola says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  11. PStamatiou says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  12. erikstarck says:

    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?

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  13. Titanous says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  14. IgorPartola says:

    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 :).

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  15. IgorPartola says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  16. IgorPartola says:

    Google X10.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  17. nissimk says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  18. IgorPartola says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  19. ojbyrne says:

    "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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  20. FraaJad says:

    Check out the GuruPlug [1].[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  21. PStamatiou says:

    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 toted their USB expansion as a huge feature.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  22. adamsmith says:

    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.)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  23. pyre says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  24. CRASCH says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  25. jnoller says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  26. whalesalad says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  27. ars says:

    BTW, it’s touted.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  28. codemechanic says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  29. fictorial says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  30. codemechanic says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  31. 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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  32. rwhitman says:

    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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  33. skolor says:

    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).

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  34. skolor says:

    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).

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  35. Raphael says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  36. brown9-2 says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  37. ojbyrne says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  38. ojbyrne says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  39. 10ren says:

    > 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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  40. spicyj says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  41. awad says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  42. awad says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  43. fhars says:

    i’ve seen a review of the guru plug that claimed that for network workload, this 1.2GHz ARM is not relly 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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  44. fhars says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  45. irq says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  46. andrewtj says:

    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/

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  47. JohnnyBrown says:

    Also crashes safari on iPhone. What gives?

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  48. Tony Hammond says:

    Hey Nat:

    Pepys Diary is even more impressive on twitter:

    http://twitter.com/samuelpepys

    On a twitter stream he sometimes manages to seem more contemporary than contemporaries. :)

    Cheers,

    Tony

    This comment was originally posted on O’Reilly Radar Insight, analysis, and research about emergin…

  49. pistoriusp says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  50. pistoriusp says:

    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.

    And those drives are shared across my network via SMB.

    You can also install an internal 2.5" drive if you want.

    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…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  51. pistoriusp says:

    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…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  52. jzting says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  53. jzting says:

    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…;

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  54. 10ren says:

    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…

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  55. 10ren says:

    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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  56. duck says:

    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.

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  57. lemming says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  58. lemming says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  59. 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…

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  60. 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 spoil the hype. </sarcasm>

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  61. 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>

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  62. duck says:

    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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  63. PStamatiou says:

    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 :)

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  64. IgorPartola says:

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

    This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

  65. jlintz says:

    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 comment was originally posted on Hacker News

5 Trackbacks

  1. [...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: Home [...]

  2. [...] Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS PaulStamatiou.com [...]

  3. [...] Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS — PaulStamatiou.com [...]

  4. [...] Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS — PaulStamatiou.com [...]

  5. [...] Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS [...]

Leave a Comment

*

Leaving so soon?

Don't forget to check out the Reviews and How-Tos, or read a random post.