Recommend me a Plug?

[mdtux]

Hi all

Been reading lots of posts and lots of the guides ... and now, I am kinda lost.

I'm embarking on my first voyage into plugs and this is the first time that I am making such a purchase. I'm more used to servers (RHEL/Centos/Scientific) - I guess you can say that I am comfortable working on the command line?

In any case, I'm looking at replacing my existing workhorse in the house - an old P4 machine. I'm looking towards the following:
- 24x7 operations at home
- a plug that is easy to install archlinux arm
- hopefully not overwrite the existing flash, so that i can dual boot the original flash and archlinux arm at will
- willing to plug in a usb hdd or sd card as required
- ability to install squid (running it in transparent mode at home)
- ability to run netfilter / iptables (nat)
- ability to run openvpn
- and of course the usual samba, rsync, ftp

At first I thought the Pogoplug would be sufficient ... but reading the instructions, it seems that it will overwrite the existing and that's something that I am afraid would go wrong. (Worried about bricking it )

Looked around at Tonido Plug - looks good except that the instructions on this site is for the first version whereas tonidoplug.com is selling TonidoPlug2.

So right now, I kinda confused.

Would appreciate any advise for a newbie ... Many thanks!

[kmihelich]

For a plug, the best in my opinion is the GoFlex Net. It gives you two sata ports to use with GoFlex portable drives, or just grab some cables to hook up other drives. It's straightforward and easy to install. Reverting to stock isn't as easy, but if you think you're going to want to go back to it just save time and don't install Arch on it at all. None of the installations touch the stock system, just modify the bootloader to place in a system that's capable of booting normal Linux.

You'll be able to do everything you want to do, and have plenty of options for storage. Should be able to find it for about $60-70, any more and you're probably getting ripped off.

[mdtux]

Thanks for the reply. GoFlex Net ... Could I just ask, any particular difference between GoFlex Net and GoFlex Home? Other than the fact that one supports 1 drive and the other 2 drives?

[WarheadsSE]

That's pretty much the difference: 1 takes 1x 3.5" SATA, the other takes 2x 2.5" SATA, otherwise, they are identical in processor, memory, NAND, ethernet. They're essentially the same board.

[mdtux]

Thanks again for the quick reply. I'll try to lay my hands on the GoFlex Net. Will report back. Many thanks again.