They are really just how to configure a Linux box to serve that function, except the new hawtness is the Raspberry Pi. One would assume people would get it by now that its just another Linux server so anything you can do with a Linux server you can do with this.
What I like about this is that folks are willing to jump into these sorts of projects with a Pi. (go go DevOps!) When they wouldn't for some reason with an "expensive" computer. It is a lot of fun and there is lots of information out there to guide you.
As for this particular example the original LinkSys ARM based file server was way ahead of the game :-). It suffers from the same problems (there is a lot of unreliability built into the equation) but it spawned a lot of copy cats and its at least as useful as putting a disk on your wireless access point to serve up tunes.
After they wax-on, wax-off for a while with the pi, they are often surprised to learn that they know Linux Kung-Fu.
I've spent a couple years developing with WAMP and dealing with windows BS, but now I'm running an Ubuntu VM and building a dev box for linux.
The pi is ultimately what put me in this direction :)
* How to run Apache on hardy * How to run Apache on lucid * How to run Apache on karmic
I was particularly annoyed because I'd written several Debian tutorials which were frequently copied/pasted from and butchered into ad-revenue for other people.
I have the SD card imaged and saved elsewhere so if the card dies, I just get another, re-image and plug it in.
Can't do that with a Mac Mini (what I was using)
Once you are comfortable you can move on to a better dedicated setup.
It's like building a model airplane. You don't do it because you need to fly across the country tomorrow in under 6 hours with drink service and a nap, you do it because you can and it's fun.
Yeah, if you want to watch 100GB Bluray from it will suck arse, but it may be adequate for document storage for example.
Attach a printer to it and you also have a print server. This little setup could serve well an office or a household.
Sure maybe transferring files to/from it is not the fastest but I find it perfectly acceptable (say a minute or so to transfer a 300MB file) and as the OP says I don't feel bad about leaving it running 24/7.
Printer serving is one thing I have not been able to transfer from my old server, seems like the Pi is not that well supported for printer drivers, but I do expect that will be resolved soon by people smarter than me.
It won't be a high performance server, but then, it's a Raspberry Pi.
Of course most of those solutions would be a lot more expensive. The HP Microserver is my current solution, with zfs. And even that could be a lot better as there's no hardware crypto support and scp is sloooooow as a result.
As a general point of cynicism (and that seems to be my mood today) - did nobody ever have a small, general purpose computer before the Raspberry Pi came along?
I'm not sure I follow - does anything that runs http://archlinuxarm.org/ count? I have four Pogoplugs at home. For about the last year or so, two of them run a web server and an rsync backup server. The other two are for learning/experimenting.
I was more just wondering why this was written at all, because 'how to plug in a USB enclosure' and 'basic samba config' are topics that are so well covered already that it seems odd anyone would write more about them. Adding 'on the Raspberry Pi' seems to be enough for people to consider it novel these days, and I start to wonder if the 'on the Raspberry Pi' crowd realize that the Pi really is just another linux computer.
Note that I'm not saying this is a bad little tutorial.
Of course, but the Pi has dropped the price point considerably. The Beagle Board targets a similar market but is several times as expensive: http://beagleboard.org/
The point of all these people doing "Raspberry Pi" articles with basic Linux stuff is to teach people who just bought a Pi and don't know how to use it. The overall point of this device is education.
Go buy a beagleboard instead, or any taiwanese hardware almost all of them release full docs
The only thing is it comes with Android and porting other Linux to it is still in early stage.
I'd definitely prefer that the entire stack is open source, but there's a lower limit to practicality.
With completely open hardware you could hack a beagleboard forever. Or buy a Cubieboard for $49, or Uputer Pi for $69,
All those tutorials show that a single very cheap and well designed piece of open hardware can be very versatile and that everything we tend to see as magic is just a one page how-to long.
I'm in my forties, an since I have had my first walkman I wanted to get inside the machine, to drive it dwork my, from the bowels. I have seen iPods, but can you ssh in an iPod? I have seen media centers, but can you bulk rename files or script it?
Now with my raspberry I finally got my dream for real, and I can even ssh to it from my phone when I'm away.
If you jailbreak it you can. Here's[1] a one page how-to long guide.
> I have seen media centers, but can you bulk rename files or script it?
Of course, providing you're using something like XBMC. For renaming you don't even need to script, there's friendly programs[2] out there if you want.
> Now with my raspberry I finally got my dream for real, and I can even ssh to it from my phone when I'm away.
I'm glad you're enjoying your Pi, but the argument about it being possible to do with other setups is just as valid. You can SSH to almost anything that'll run SSH from your phone.
[1] - http://guides.macrumors.com/SSH_into_your_iPod_touch_(Window...
[2] - http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Category:Rename_tools
It's not really novel though, there are a lot of other things out there that are interesting too. It's also not quite as open as it could be, for instance the bootloader on my sheevaplug from '09 was able to be hacked, flashed and updated to support more boot devices (just as an example). And some of us were doing this whole Debian/ARM box/USB enclosure/fileserver thing back in '05 with the linksys NSLU2, which wasn't much more expensive back then. Much less capable of course, but...
I guess it just rubs some folks up the wrong way. In reality it's awesome that so many people are getting an intro to linux this way, but it also feels like a bunch of teenagers who think their generation invented music :)
2) Install and setup file servers ('apt-get install samba nfs-server')
Also does Raspian support a lot of USB drives out of the box?
For extra credit you could investigate running minidlna on it to expose your media to things like smart-tvs and playstations.
--edit-- On the external drives thing, most USB drive enclosures should just work (tm) with linux these days, however there used to be problems surrounding power-saving. This is due to them being designed around the way windows uses external enclosures, and linux not waking them the same way, or not realising they had gone to sleep or something, and many disk enclosures I used with older ARM debian boxes (4+ years back) had a habit of going to sleep and not waking up.
tl;dr - YMMV, best to stick to one that is known-good.
