> There has been some discussion lately about SheevaPlugs. Does anyone
> have any comments on using this device or their derivatives? Or better
> still willing to give a talk at the next Southampton BaB. I have been
> looking at the TonidoPlug which is reasonably priced and can be used
> for storage on the LAN which would probably be my main use. Has anyone
> bought on of these?
I have a SheevaPlug which I bought from New-IT [1]. I think it's an
excellent choice for an always-on Linux server for the home. It came
with Debian Lenny pre-installed. I use it for various things but
primarily it's a fileserver (Samba, NFS) and backup server (rsnapshot)
with an attached 1TB USB HDD. It's very stable and "just works". It
has about 10 times the power of the NSLU2 [2] so you can generally do
more stuff quicker with it. Whats neat is the in-built USB serial port
so if there is a problem, or you want to re-install with Ubuntu or you
want to mess with the bootloader it is very easy - it's like having a
mini-VGA port on it. That is a useful advantage over the NSLU2.
At the next Southampton meet (sometime in May and TBC) I'd be willing
to give a talk about it and present some uses for it. There's a thread
right now about OpenDNS and someone mentioned running your own
resolver for speed and (geek bragging rights ;-), the 'plug is ideal
for this. If your home LAN has several machines on it then you could
also manage your own DNS with it. In my home it is "imran.local", so I
can always get at things with desktop.imran.local, router.imran.local,
debian1-xen.imran.local etc
I've toyed with the idea of turning it into a firewall/router but the
single Gigabit port is rather limiting and I didn't want to mess with
USB ethernet adaptors. Since I bought it though, they have released
models with two ports and wireless so I'm sure someone somewhere has
done this kind of thing.
[1]
http://www.newit.co.uk/
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