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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?
> 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...
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?
Don't you think that the new puppy might cause some compatability issues with the CDs? I predict some data loss unless you do your homework...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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
RTFA, and look at the pics. It's a Mini(FlexATX/ITX) board (I've seen the case sold as a Mini-ITX case that could also hold the smaller MFATX boards), and yes, it DOES run Linux. I don't think port 23 would be open, though.
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.
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.
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.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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.
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
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.