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Personal File Server For The Masses
prostoalex writes "California-based Inspiri is coming to the market with Mirra - a personal file-server with simple backup solutiion, remote access as well as file-sharing capabilities. The $399 device comes with 120 GB hard drive, front-mounted USB ports and Ethernet interface. There are some pictures of Mirra on the corporate Web site. The founder of Inspiri, Tim Bucher, according to the corporate documents, had an interesting career, having worked at both Apple and Microsoft, while the VP of Engineering in this company used to work as acting CEO of Apple's Newton business group."
So the bigwig at the company used to work for apple but the site says that his new appliance will only work with a WinXP machine?
What's that about?
...like the point of this? It's 400, pretty big in size, and all it does is store files? For 400, you could get a bare-bones system running Red Hat or something and shove in near half a terrabyte. Or just get tape backups and save a gazillion dollars. I think it's too soon to feature a product like this, as the people aren't ready and the entreprise can surely spend the money more wisely.
A blog like any other.
and can I get a shell on it?
Anything powerful enough to act as a decent fileserver for me, by which I mean able to tunnel rsync through ssh at a decent rate, is fast enough to run inetd servers of BSD games or host a MUD.
I won't buy machines that are crippled. Does it do more than an $80 120gb hard disk dropped into a $5 PC with an ethernet card?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
- It's linux and I can muck around.
- It's got WiFi.
- Setup to handle printing for my home net.
Been there done this. There must be dozens of these kind of devices on the market already./charles
They seem to be a little behind: seen today at my local computer store: 160G, Ethernet and USB2.0, SMB file server, $289. It's about the same size as your regular desktop disk enclosure. Don't remember the brand name, however. Didn't do NFS.
I wish they had included support for WebDAV
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Wait...
- $400 is steep
- you built a similar system with 30Gb storage for $369
how much do you think a 120Gb drive goes for?
"So the question is, how much will people pay for a convenience?"
I'm guessing that with shipping included, the cost is just about even. I mean, you guys are talking about being able to build the same system for $350... that's NOT a huge savings, considering the time you'll spend on the install.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
The thing is, I doubt most folks have the skills to cobble together the box itself. And many who do simply don't have the time or desire to screw with it - especially when 120GB of online storage is $400. You or I wouldn't buy this, but we're not the market - and 400 bucks is pretty good price when you consider most folks would end up paying $200 just to get a 120GB drive installed in their existing machine, or even a $399 e-machine.
But the "Inspiri" service is the killer app. Because you can run a stateful firewall and still get your files from a relatively secure home network by authenticating through their service. If the system works as advertised, that's a really nice feature. No need to configure "pinholes" or setup a DMZ on the home network or even know what any of that crap means. All they need now is a "matching" firewall appliance and they got a potentially killer business model: protecting home networks against intrusion while allowing plug and play telepresence.
And if they would just market it in Hong Kong and Japan and plug up all those leaky high speed home lines they might actually make the internet a better place. Very nice.
If they're using Linux, they need to make sure the source code is available under GPL terms. I hope that's the case - has anyone bought one and does it include source code or a written offer for source code ?
I'm on HP's Open Source review board, and one of the things we make damn sure of before shipping any HP product with GPL code in it is that the product includes source code or an offer for the customer to get it.
That's the really important thing all these embedded Linux using compaies need to understand.
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
So a "bajillion" is arround 2000?
CD's are not good for backing up - if you have a 100GB hard drive you need arround 150CDs. Lets say you can burn a CD in 5 minutes (allowing time for coasters), that takes 12 hours of your time, cost arround $50 for the CD's, and at $20 an hour $240 for your time. That 100GB file server starts looking more tempting.
Of course if you're going for a file server, you should be going for a fast box with gigE, booting off a CD into RAM, and 8 200GB or 300GB hard drives, giving you between 1.5 and 2.5TB of readilly available storage, should cost more then $3000 even with a top of the line processer and a gig of ram.
Obviously HDD's crash, so have them as a raid array - Still get 1.2TB of data on there, for $2.50 a gig. More expensive then DVDR or CD, but more convienent, and a lot cooler when you can answer "how much disk space you got" with terrabytes.
Say, for example, you have an old tower, a couple of 80GB IDE disks in it (no scsi), and one spare PCI slot. The whole thing is worth well under $1000, so is there a tape drive (or other hi-cap backup device) that would be suitable for this?
You can get Seagate Travan drive on ebay for about $200, but they do 10GB native, which makes for something around 10 tapes for a complete backup - not very practical.
There are internal IDE/EIDE AIT drives with decent capacities, but they are in the $1000 range.
So, do people:
Maybe this should be (or already was?) an Ask Slashdot...
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
Ok "the masses" to me means people who aren't overly computer literate, but are interested in transporting data from home to work or wherever.
As for backup, usually that is handled automatically at work. At home maybe all they would need to do is backup documents and email.. which will fit on a cd. And besides, relying on one 120gb HD as a backup makes no sense. If you want incremental backups... it won't last long. And you need removable media to store somewhere else.
As for the "computer saavy" person. Christ.. It'd be much cheaper for me to simply carry around an HD on it's own, open the friggin case and plug it into an IDE channel.
Do what I do, store files on your local machine, sync to network storage, and once in awhile buy a new HD and store the old one someplace safe. I burn really important files - source code and the like - to CD on odd intervals.
It isn't ideal, but it's good enough for my purposes (and most others, I assume).
These little boxes are great for that. Just don't use them for primary storage is all.
..don't panic
thats what their angle is. dont have enough admin skills to install samba on your linux box? buy our box and plug it into your ethernet network. Need a DNS server? there's a box for that too. Google sells its search server in a rack mount box. just plug it in and go. if unix was made of many command line programs that could be piped together, the thinking at this company is that server should be purchased in pieces - one service per piece. I hate to think of the wasted coal exhaust or force of a mighty river that is slowed a bit for each 400W the power supply that is powering a cpu/mobo/hd to be idle 99% of the time.
when i first read the article, judging by the specs i thought they were describing a product that was esentially an iPod with out the mp3 player. that would be somewhat interesting.
I did.
I got an Apple Beige G3 Desktop (266MHz, 256MB RAM) system for $50 from my father's Employer.
Bought a 120GB WD1200 Drive (Drivezilla). And a A-CARD ATA/66 IDE Card.
Installed OS X. Installed Samba with Fink. (later upgraded to 10.2 where Samba through fink wasn't needed).
That's all.
AppleShare for connecting my Mac OS 9 System. SMB for my wintel boxes.
Could share a printer if I wanted as well.
SpamAssassin and pop3proxy.pl (aka SAproxy) allows it to serve as a spam filtering proxy server.
Usermin (part of Webmin) for changing password.
Apache with mod_DAV allows for WebDAV support when on the road (very cool I might ad).
Works like a charm.
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If an off-site user has properly authenticated to the Mirra service at the Ispiri host, and requests a file, the service makes the request when the Mirra next touches base. The advantage of this approach is that the connection is initiated by the Mirra server inside the user's router or firewall. This means that no firewall or router reconfiguration is required to allow an external server to get information from within the network. It's an approach that minimizes user effort and security risk.
Great....someone hacks the protocol, and a remotely controlled server running proprietary software hands them the keys to my network?I'm not sure about the no router or FW reconfig -- my stupid Replay TV box never did work behind my FW...it couldn't understand a proxy (unless it was setup as transparent). Of course ReplayTV has in their contract that they can download any update they want that may disable any feature they want like Tivo has done in the past. Now some company wants me to put a file-server on my network that is designed to regularly ask them for instructions to execute on itself behind my FW -- with it designed to understand and work through a FW? Why does this make me uneasy. ([shhhhh, just close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears and all will be well; this isn't the opendoor security breach you are looking for....])
Huh, wuh...sounds secure to me!
-l