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USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
I had the realization that I'm not geek enough to care about posting on this topic.
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Plug it in at the end of the day, pick it up in the morning. RIAA/MPAA catches the traffic? No tracing it back to you.
I already torrent furiously in my sleep.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A tiny computer that can download files while another computer sits idly by.
Big. Fucking. Deal.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Argh!
It's one of the following:
1/50 the power usage
or
a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC
Isn't this somewhat akin to what the much-hyped KillerNIC was all about-- a separate device to offload network activity (for example, BitTorrent downloads)?
I've got the Sheevaplug that has the Marvell SoC. Its got an SD interface, 512 MB ram, USB 2.0 and the size of a wall wart. It is running Ubuntu and I have it scheduled to pick up torrent files nightly. Cost $99 for the Sheevaplug and $14 for the SD card. For additional space a .5TB hard drive can be connected via the USB for those really big files.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
The KillerNIC has been operating as an independent torrent device for years. It's overpriced so people ignore it, but it works well and runs Linux.
I guess this is nice because it saves power? There are other dedicated torrent devices for that - ones with proper hard drives instead of SD cards. I don't mean to come down as overly negative, but this is really not impressing me.
I imagine it wouldn't be very cost effective to download, more for uploading since flash cards aren't exactly cheap..... Music however, wouldn't be a problem.
there are so many other low-powered devices that will do so much more. like you could probably mod a router to run rtorrent and plenty of NAS already have torrent support. i have rtorrent running off a pico-itx board that also hosts my website,email,ftp,ssh,gopher,xmpp, a few python socket servers for random crap and if i had a script that would make me appear to be logged in on all those social networking sites 25/7 it would run this too.
having something that only supports bittorrent seems pretty limiting when you can have a fully featured unix CLI-based machine with plenty of room for expansion. but i said the same thing about a device that would "only play mp3's" in 2000
This is truly the year of linux on the desktop. Even Microsoft is embracing it now.
I already have Torrent functionality in my Asus W500L router with support for storing the files onto any attached USB drive.
Why the need for this device when you'll need your router on anyway?
well... thats the color that little icon with a u on it is at least :P
It's called the "Killer NIC". It's a PCI Express network card which offloads network packet processing to a custom embedded Linux distro running on a 400MHz ARM processor with 256MB of RAM, and oh, it works with Vista. As it's independent of the main CPU, it can run applications, such as a bittorrent client, while the main CPU attends to other tasks while still acting as a NIC for the main CPU even if one of the on-board applications is also network oriented -- they call this "Flexible Network Architecture" or "FNA apps." Oh, and did I mention that it has a USB port for storage of such applications and any associated data ( such as files downloaded via Bittorent ) on a USB flash drive?
Another "great innovation" from Microsoft.
jdb2
Yeah, but can it stay up all night looking up wikipedia for names of obscure early-90s dance acts and then scour all the torrent sites for full albums instead of just "Best of 90's Dance You Like Me Now?" compilations, and then stare at bittorrent, begging more seeders to come online to increase the speed from 0.01KB/s, and then say "screw it" and download the latest metallica and eminem albums on principle, delete them without listening to them, because it doesnt really like metallica or eminem, and then wander off to youtube to watch old WCW videos?
If not, it can't truly duplicate my torrent experience.
Most ridiculous thing I've seen in awhile. I guess it would be pretty low power. But why not use a headless torrent server on an older box you weren't using for anything? I just can't see this device being standardized in any way, compared to a regular old server.
The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.
Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.
A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.
Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.
Here's something that hobyists have been doing for a long time. Get a router or NAS that can run Linux and put all the services you want on it. You now have something that works when your computer is completely powered down (not just in S3 sleep mode), requires no USB ports and if you really want to you can enable wake-on-LAN on your computer and have the same ability to remotely wake your computer with a particular network message as this board gives.
Zombie computers.
You can purchase a linksys router that will download your torrents to a usb hdd or cf card. One less thing that takes up a usb port.
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
The makers say this is a proof of concept. But it isn't. Networking protocols are incredibly flexible, on purpose. This device cannot know how to answer on a given socket unless the code I've written to answer is running on this device. Which isn't going to happen since my code is running in a different address space, on a different processor architecture on a different OS.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I was wondering about that myself.
For places where you don't have two ethernet cables, using a _USB_ primary NIC doesn't sit well with me at all. Reaching under my desk to switch cables isn't an option either.
The famous broadcom 802.11g router chip and its successors use MIPS based microprocessors, not ARM.
I like the idea it makes the computer much more efficient. The one design decision that confuses me is the choice of using the nic card. I guess it benefits those without a router, but couldn't you just develop a os for a nas that does the exact same thing. Main benefit is that it doesn't require a proprietary nic card designed for torrenting.
Right, so they've created a prototype of what's been running on my old NSLU2 box for the last several months: NSLU2 + screen + rtorrent + flexget.py + ccxstream = all this and much more
Total cost: $0 (well, I had the NSLU2 plus a 8Gb USB key lying around)
My housemate has something similar. It's the typical NAS with two drives, but the cool part is the web interface. You can c&p torrent urls straight into it and even manage all your existing torrents through the web interface. So every computer in the house has a central torrent location. When it's time to play L4D we don't have to go around checking which machine is sucking all the band, we just log into the NAS and pause the torrents.
Just went and looked at it. It's a D-link DNS 323 (company link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509).
I'd say the d-link beats the Microsoft research team's device (even though gumstix is awesome). No pc required and it can sit anywhere on your network.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
If you resent the electricity that people use to see a movie, clearly you resent the fact that people exist at all.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"In the office environment, 52% of respondents left their machines on for remote access, and 35% did so to support applications running in the background, of which e-mail and IM were most popular (47%)."
Never mind the fact that emails are saved on the server, but is this device is really necessary in case "An instant messenger (IM) client will require the PC to be on in order for the user to stay "online" (reachable) to their contacts."
So instead of telling a significant number of respondents that they really don't have to leave their computer ON to run background applications such as IM and email (unless of course you are running an IM/email server at work or home), the author does a cartwheel while holding a sermon on how to be green.
Now that everybody has get some green in order to be green, something similar but different, here is a bare-bone OS running on a daughter card (PCIe) which allows secure access to the host's hardware even when the host is OFF but the motherboard still has power. http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/drac5/OM53/en/ug/racugc1.htm#31825. Works with Dell. A must if you don't have unrestricted physical access to your servers, and every once in a while the main power cycles but your servers don't boot/reboot automatically.
Small correction to the main article, a couple of the authors are from University of California, San Diego and not University of San Diego.
In case you prefer something more than a preconfigured appliance: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Main_Page
Debian is also available, in fact it officially supports devices like this.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It might be linux, but it's still crap.
From the article:
Sorry... still no anonymity. Did you actually think the same developer responsible for DRM-enforcing Windows Vista would actually help produce a device that might make you immune to it?
A tiny computer that can download files while another computer sits idly by.
Yo dawg, we herd you like torrents, so we put a computer in your computer so you can torrent while you torrent.
...so Microsoft creates a device that runs Linux??
Wait, let me check the temperature...
Yours sincerely,
The Devil
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yet ANOTHER ARM CPU that is attached to a x86 computer running Windows. Seriously - DITCH the x86 already. ARM devices are doing more and more as far as 'good enough' computing is concerned. The 'everything else' that Windows does on x86 is getting less and less.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
When really close to zero cost pirating just isn't "free" enough for you. Based on: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html running a gaming rig 24/7 costs about $400 per year. But ~ a third of that would be during normal usage time so would be spent any ways, so roughly $266 per year for the overnight running. I think I'm willing to pay less than $1 a day for the amount I can pirate (or feed a child in africa). Still it will save you money in the long run, just not a drastic need.
The easier and perhaps more flexible solution is to grab a plug computer (SheevaPlug, in my case) and install Apache and TorrentFlux. I downloaded the latest Kubuntu DVD ISO whilst I was away for the weekend, using 2.7W of power.
I also have it set up as a print/file/web/DNS/distro package server too; next step, MythTV.
Call me when eMule is installed!
Most home NAS devices are headless linux servers, and many of them support taking over a torrent download when you shut down your PC. Or you can start a torrent/ftp/whatever download directly onto it in the first place. Maybe a home NAS uses more power than a USB stick, but much less than a typical PC or even a laptop. They also often have a full LAMP stack and much more storage than a USB stick thingy.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
(deep breath) Has anyone made a bit torrent that downloads to a remote/private HTTP server that then allows for direct downloading so I can get around my university's security folks on my desktop (and release)? If not someone should. And give me full access.
-David Anon.
FTA: The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack.
There's no way im touching that man. I know what happens when matter and anti-matter collide...
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
I already have ARM-based BitTorrent over WiFi while my PC sleeps on my smartphone.
Maybe he was really backed up.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I find great joy in reading that Microsoft is behind a project based on Linux.
It means to me that they too realize that their operating system is bloated and cannot efficiently power small digital devices.
There was a card released over a year ago, the killer NIC, that did all this and more. It basically ran traffic shaping to save people some 5ms on their gaming ping times.
Sorry... still no anonymity. Did you actually think the same developer responsible for DRM-enforcing Windows Vista would actually help produce a device that might make you immune to it?
Do you realize that asking such an ignorant question proves you're an idiot?
/. will feature articles on it every 30 seconds on how another one was hacked for a couple months after its release.
"Impersonating" the host is what makes this thing work. If it couldn't be programmed out of the box to act as a separate host on the network, then I'll go eat my socks. Otherwise,
Microsoft researchers created a Linux-based device that the RIAA won't like?
Dang... can anybody think of a knee-jerk Slashdot response for this one?
I want a router running OneSwarm. Or rather, I wish everybody else had one :-). It wouldn't even have to download anything to keep me happy, just as long as it forwards connections.
Biggest problem with OneSwarm currently seems to be keeping the network intact when people have systems that aren't on line all the time.
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
If you were so certain that what you said was true, you wouldn't be hiding behind the veil of AC and giving up the karma bonus your wit and genius would bring you, would you?
You're right that the impersonation is what makes it work, but not "work" in the way you claim. Do you actually think you can make it "impersonate" a completely different IP on your ISP's network than the one assigned to the host system? I doubt that's possible. Nope, instead it will be stuck interacting on the same outward-facing IP address that the host (and the rest of the internal network) is using, connected to the same cable/ADSL modem that asked for that IP in the first place. How do you expect to hide your activities when you're using the same IP address?
Enjoy the taste of that cheap cotton-poly blend with a subtle hint of fungal bloom.
It's sure hard for the music and movie industries to argue that only pirates use torrent technology when a company like microsoft is spending money on R&D to bring this technology to the masses.
Perhaps microsoft understands that these industies claims on bittorent tech is a bunch of bull. Very telling.
Or perhaps its a trap!!
Hook one of these up with solar power and *put it in an empty lot* near your house.
Why Officer I wasn't seeding, see: my Bittorrent isn't seeding anything.
Never mind the fact that emails are saved on the server
Most IM services do too. XMPP does, and AIM started doing it a few months ago as well.
Isn't this just another way of making your PC part of a zombie network even while it's sleeping?