Personal File Server For The Masses 263
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."
That's odd (Score:4, Interesting)
What's that about?
i must be missing something... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it run Linux or another UNIX workalike, (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
They're late to the game (Score:5, Interesting)
a little behind, perhaps? (Score:5, Interesting)
support for WebDAV (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$400? (Score:2, Interesting)
- $400 is steep
- you built a similar system with 30Gb storage for $369
how much do you think a 120Gb drive goes for?
"So the question is, how much will people pay for a convenience?"
I'm guessing that with shipping included, the cost is just about even. I mean, you guys are talking about being able to build the same system for $350... that's NOT a huge savings, considering the time you'll spend on the install.
The service is the killer app (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It's all about the source code.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not needed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
backup? (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Doesn't anyone do market research anymore? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Most people don't back up period (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
a physical box per service (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Do it yourself (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's all about the source code.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, if I had rolled my own kernel, then I would have to release source for those changes. But so long as I use something stock, it's no big deal.
After all, how many companies sell proprietary software for Linux? Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Mathematica. Enough that we've all heard of them and know that they make money doing it. You DO NOT have to GPL your code just because it runs on linux. You have to GPL your changes to GPL code though - which is why most black-box vendors will NOT alter the kernel or GPL'ed libraries at all. It makes their job tougher, as they don't have the flexibility to alter/strip down the low level pieces, but they don't help out their competitors either.
Re:It's all about the source code.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
Security problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
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