Stephen, this was the best critical review of plug computers I've read
to date.
Many thanks for sharing your experience. I'd already discounted the
guruplug as an option (due to overheating issues). Wow, that's some
poor bandwidth through the eSATA connection.
You've got me looking back to the sempron for home network solutions.
On 02/02/2011 11:40 AM, Stephen Gregory wrote:
On 11-01-30 09:47 PM, Paul B. wrote:
I've been waiting for the ARM revolution to hit my home, and I'm now
wondering if it's here.
The ARM revolution is here, but it is not much of a revolution. There
are many black box consumer products with ARM (and MIPS). Many of these
you can jam Linux on. I don't think we will see a real revolution until
we can easily buy more general purpose ARM boxes.
I have a guruplug server plus from GlobalScale. It seems to be
discontinued which is a good thing. The GuruPlug ServerPlus has a bad
design and easily overheats. The replacement, the DreamPlug, looks good
...
I've got a box in the basement that I'm pretty sure could be replaced by
one(!) of these things.
You could use one Guruplug or DreamPlug for BIND, DHCP, NTP, Firewall,
and IMAP. The cpu is up to the task (openwrt on a 200MHz MIPS can handle
the first four at least). The only task you might have issues with the
IMAP. I found the eSATA speed to be terrible. I was lucky to read faster
then 10Mbyte/s. It is the reason I didn't replace my home server (IMAP,
SMTP, Samba, and NFS) with my GuruPlug.
...
The ARM plugs are fun to play around with and a good learning
experience. In terms of a home server there is not a whole lot of value
(IMHO). The 'plugs are really prototype platforms aimed at designers
working on commercial products like the PogoPlug, and many of the home
NAS boxes. For similar amounts of money (or less) you could get an AMD
Sempron 140, or Intel Atom system that will draw 30 watts are less at
idle, and provide a whole lot more performance, and be easier to work with.