[ChuckMcM]

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.

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.

[noonespecial]

I find that fan-freaking-tastic because I've noticed that the people doing these things often had very little Linux experience to start with. The pi makes it unscary because so little is at risk. They don't feel like they're working on a "computer" and its immediately obvious that if you screw up, you can just pull out your card and reflash.

After they wax-on, wax-off for a while with the pi, they are often surprised to learn that they know Linux Kung-Fu.

[bduerst]

I bought a pi for a Raspbmc media center, and because I wanted it to do more than the vanilla XBMC, I ended up having to learn linux. I ended up buying a second pi for a Samba NAS and web server.

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 :)

[danudey]

And for what it's worth, stories like this are basically why the Pi exists.

[stevekemp]

We saw the same thing a few years ago with the release of Ubuntu. As soon as the first couple of releases were out there were a million and one blog-spam articles like:

* 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.

[agumonkey]

Yep, interesting how price point and form factor twist people's state of mind.

[adeaver]

Not only that but recoverability. I use the Pi as a media server (files hosting on a NAS drive) and if the Pi dies, I drop $40, swap out the SD card and I'm done.

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)

[agumonkey]

Can't imagine what it's gonna be when we'll be able to print rpis~ at home for 5$.

[samstave]

Can you give some details on what you imaged to the SD?