Interesting, so there are like a billion blog entries "How to build a Raspberry Pi <X> Server" where X is "file", "print", "media", "security", "email", "web", "DNS", Etc.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I’d say: don’t. The performance you will be getting is horrible. Ethernet is connected via USB on the Raspberry Pi, so while via Ethernet, you can achieve about 90 Mbit/s, that speed drops to ≈ 40 Mbit/s once you access a USB hard disk drive. This is without any kind of encryption.
The Pi is great and all, but after running setups like these for many years (ARM server + USB enclosure), I came to the conclusion you're better off with some other solution if you're transferring even a few GB around the place.<p>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.<p>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?
Why does anybody use Rasberry Pi. It is a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations. It isn't even remotely an open platform unless you think a few pages of documentation for the enormous amounts of blobs is 'open'. It's one big mess of Broadcom firmware.<p>Go buy a beagleboard instead, or any taiwanese hardware almost all of them release full docs
To those always replying to raspberry articles that it can be done with other setups, and that it's nothing new, I think you're missing the point:<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
An excellent, cheap plan if you've never set up samba etc. before. To those rolling their eyes at a "toy" solution (and it's better than that), when you _do_ need a bit more performance and more discs I'd highly recommend one of these <a href="http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421" rel="nofollow">http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-micr...</a> which HP have been practically giving away for years (£89 after cashback!) - a bit larger & faster than a Pi, 1GiB RAM, four hot-swap drive bays and gigabit ethernet.
did that years ago ..with a NSLU2 :)
<a href="http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/gallery.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/gallery.html</a>
Would it be much different with other distributions folks are using on the Pi? I would think BSD/Unix variants would be different.<p>Also does Raspian support a lot of USB drives out of the box?