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Homer Server Appliance Box

240 points posted to Servers and Storage by johnnilsson 05/27/07

Dell should create hardware that's usable for home server appliance things.

That could mean HTPC applications. P2P services such as VoIP, BitTorrent, XMPP. Backup storage. HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, DNS and other web-services for the home.

Requirements for this kind of hardware would be
Low noise, preferably silent and nice design so that it can be placed in living spaces.
Stability and low power requirements for reliable and cheap 24/7 operation.
Development community for innovating and developing software for new uses. Dell involvement in community to provide infrastructure, support (both techincal and legal) and modify/extend the hardware as the need arises. Preferably open source platform.

See Neuros Technology [1] and NSLU2-Linux [2] for inspiration.

[1] http://www.neurosaudio.com/
[2] http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

helmecj01
05/27/07		 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default...<
jorge
05/27/07		 Can I run a Limewire server on it as well? What about Napster v1.0? Can I run a EA Game server on it? Whats the 411?
johnnilsson
05/27/07		 Regarding MS Home Server. It seems to suffer from the same problem as the thousands of Linux distributions trying to fill this market segment. Lack of cheap suitable hardware. It's not enough to have the software, there has to be a hardware platform behind it. Sure any geek can assemble something from the local PC-shop. But specially designed and cheap boxes would make everything so much easier.

See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#Special-purpose_dist... or http://lwn.net/Distributions/#embed and http://lwn.net/Distributions/#special
Or http://www.rpath.com/corp/ for that matter.
bennish
05/27/07

homer server!
helmecj01
05/28/07		 You can run Ubuntu Server Edition on it as

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition
bennish
05/28/07		 ahh jeez helmecj01. they're doing ubuntu on their computers okay?

you don't have to go putting ubuntu links in every post
 
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