Pocket Linux Server Showdown

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put together a review of two pocket Linux servers (the Gumstix Connex 200 and the Waysmall 200BT). The review covers all aspects, including programming for the devices and their respective communities: "As with any OSS-based project, the community is what makes the Waysmall powerful. It's the community that comes up with novel applications, and develops new uses for the existing hardware. The Waysmall community is coming together as evidenced by several very involved projects and a healthy online presence in the wiki and mailing lists. Additionally, the Gumstix developers seem to be taking active roles in the community, folding community recommendations into their products as well as offering leadership and advice. Somewhat more organized and comprehensive documentation would be welcome, but not if it comes at the expense of accuracy, which the current documentation seems to have in hand.""

Comments

I tried Soekris

[bzipitidoo]

I've been looking for small cheap headless computers for a long time, but they are hard to search. Want to use them as servers. Found Soekris, which does the job, but took a while to set up. Had to figure out how to net boot, cross compile, and work around various limitations. Meanwhile, the distro I used (uwoody from ucLibc) has vanished, so if I want to update, I'll have to start from scratch. Would prefer something easier to set up, and these don't sound like they are any easier. Still, glad to know about Waysmall and BlackDog. Anyone know of others?

uses for Gumstix Connex

[jpostel]

I have to admit that, although I have no use for the Connex right now, the ultra geeky coolness of them makes my mouth water.

The only thing that came to mind about these was what a great distributed cracking tool they would be. I can't recall the first place that I read about the idea (2600? phrack?) of putting a small wall-mount box in a telco closet leaching off the nearest T1. It would be soooo easy. Although I've never done it, I've often planned it out in my head. I worked for a couple companies that had branch offices scattered around the US with no local IT presence. They only site visits were to upgrade servers, switches, or routers. It was pretty rare that anyone would touch anything unless they were expressly told to do so. A box on the wall would go completely unnoticed. During a site visit, we once found a BSD firewall attached to our network in a branch office that had been installed by a previous consulting company. We had not detected it in our remote scans because it was configured to be transparent.