[Nursie]

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.

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?

[dcuthbertson]

> 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.

[Nursie]

Sorry, text and sarcasm don't always play nicely. I've had sheevaplugs and before that NSLU2s, and a couple of more exotic ARM boards too.

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.

[BHSPitMonkey]

He was not asking sincerely; He was commenting on the influx of articles representing the current fascination with using the Raspberry Pi for projects like this (since there is nothing particularly new about the R-Pi other than its low price).

[astine]

"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?"

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/

[lazylizard]

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ ???

[autotravis]

Yes, but not that small. I used an old laptop previously and it was much larger, louder and used more electricity.