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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."
For $400 bucks, I can buy a bajillion CDs and back up that way.
And go out to dinner with the wife, and maybe get some drinks.
And a new puppy.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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?
> used to work as acting CEO of Apple's Newton business group.
A recipe for success, obviously.
I bet that this can be replaced with a pentium 1 + ethernet card + Linux/BSD. It doesn't take a whole lot to be a file server.
Save a little money. Just get a 120 GB IDE hard drive and an old box with Linux.
It's all about the ethernet...
...to the EXXTREME! (but with extra Is)
Snap servers have always been more expensive than they should be. At cdw a comparable box would cost you $857.78 for the Snap Server 1100 120GB.
For over a year I've been using old P2's and debian to make large 1TB+ network storage for just around $1000. That's 8X more than what the Snap has for around the same price.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
...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.
With its 4 usb 1.1 ports that run at a whopping combined throughput of 11mbps. I can add 4 external hds that end up having the same throughput as my old floppy drive.
Is this an Ad or an article?
$400 is a bit steep. I just built a computer for one of my relatives. Pentium 4 Celery, 1.7GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, 30G hard drive, keyboard, optical mouse, nice small form factor IWILL case. Total cost was $369 with shipping from newegg.com. A larger hard drive would not have cost much more, and I got a whole computer minus monitor.
So the question is, how much will people pay for a convenience? It just seems most people interested in having their own file server would be the crowd of people that would just make their own.
Your average home user would probably not need or even know exactly what a fileserver/backup solution would do for them.
Still though, we will see what happens. I think at $300 it would be a much more attractive solution.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
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.
And, even more interesting, ended up with Linux:
Because the Mirra server is built on a Linux software platform, the files stored on the appliance should be safe from worms and viruses that attack Windows-based servers
Link
"Mirra ... remote backup for the Gangsta!"
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The Mirra appliance is expandable through its four USB 1.1 ports, and Ispiri plans to release hard disks and other devices for the server in 2004, Mandeberg says.
The image make it look like the size of a tower which could take internal IDE hard drives. It seems like the wording of this may be misleading, because who in their right mind would use a USB 1.1 external hard drive on a file server? If that is the case, who are they marketing this too?
Sound waves should be free!
I'm sorry, but being head of the Newton group is not necessarially a mark in your favor.
As the proud former owner of an Apple Newton MP110, I can tell you never played with one. They were revolutionary before their time, trying things that only now are catching on (Write in your own handwriting->Text; oh wait, that's Tablet PC)
A little on the large side, but this was 1995 -- yes, 8 years ago.
- 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'm not sure what this phrase means. "Something for the masses" is usually a euphamism for "mass produced item sold at walmart stores that takes no intelligence to use."
/plug
Now computers and extra equipment usally are not for the masses if they requirme more thought than pointing and clicking. When you start mentioning things like (from the article:) Mirra comprises three pieces: hardware, software, and service, you start start losing the masses. If I were to say this to my grandmother, mother, sister, brother, father, etc they would all think I was talking about some slothing line and laundry service.
For those of use that are not part of the masses and know how to install an operating system, There are may great linux distros that do everything that is offered in the article for much cheaper. Look at E-Smith for a great solution for home/office/small business, or even school districts. It's free for the developer release and it even runs on those old Pentium 233 machines that are laying around.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I wish they had included support for WebDAV
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
And it runs Linux! So its a box built by a guy from apple that runs linux thats only compatable wiht XP. Ow, my head...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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
I bougt one of these exact cases w/ a Cyrix 933mhz to be my OpenBSD 3.2 firewall. Uptime is about 190 days so far. Usually load is at 3% or less and used memory is 34 megs. Only caveat is that the powersupply fan is surprisingly loud. The box w/ motherboard and chip, nothing lese was $120 at Fry's. The box is actually a Falcon PC.
This guy is way out there
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.
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?
Market share.
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.
Way to much babble from /.'rs about how they can build their own cheaper.
- This is for the masses where (masses="total population" - geeks). It isn't 4 u.
- It does the backups automatically by just selecting files from interface integrated with Windows explorer.
- It keeps the last 8 versions of the files
- You can access your files from anywhere on the internet. Even from behind a corporate firewall cause it authenticates thru their server.
Can your crappy home built server do all that (without spending a few weeks writing scripts)?
I wouldn't buy one, but I think it is cool.
-
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
...try putting in an easy-to-use backup system for your parents gigs of photos and video. it's not easy...
FreeBSD isn't licensed under the GPL.
But if you do find a product like this running GNU/Linux, and not distributing the source code, please let FSF know at license-violation@fsf.org. We've seen it before on products just like this one, and we'll get you source code.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used