I got a TonidoPlug computer for my birthday (my wife really knows how to shop!) and it arrived this week. You can check out the details on their site here.
I mainly wanted one to play around with, but since we now have this small school set up in our house with a bunch of computers I have it set up as a central server. The kids can store their files on the TonidoPlug and then have access to them from any one of the school computers in the house. The school computers we received on have 20 GB drives on them, so there is not a lot of storage (not that the kids will need much for their school work).
Setup was a breeze. Plug in the TonidoPlug, connect it to the Network switch, attach a powered USB hub, add a 160GB USB drive and then log in! Running through the initial login was very straightforward with the interface that Tonido has created. It runs silently on about 5W of power.
I have learned a lot about Linux security in the last few days however. On our internal home network, I was easily able to add shortcuts to the Shared drive on the TonidoPlug for all of the Windows systems. This is because Windows ignores the Linux file permissions. However, from my Linux based machine, I had to do some work getting file permissions correct on the TonidoPlug so that I could mount it on our main computer running Ubuntu and copy/delete files to the Plug. I finally got that straightened out tonight, thanks to some great help from the Tonido Forums.
I think I might drop all of my music collection on it now. It has a music player pre-installed so I can listen to my music collection from anywhere that has Internet access!
The other nice thing is that if I ever need to share large files, I can set up shared folders and give anyone access to read/write to that folder (with a username and password). This would have been great after our Florida vacation when everyone wanted to share pictures. We found a site to use, but it would have been much easier if I had had this set up back then!
I have also seen some posts about using it as a way to host static websites. I think the possibilities go far beyond what I have time for.
Enough for now. It has been a long time since I posted anything here!
