Meet my Server, Bubba

Bubba is both heavier and smaller than I expected, weighing roughly 3.5 pounds and yet scarcely larger than a typical 3.5-inch IDE drive. Four models are available, differing in the size of their hard drive from 80 to 750GB. The Bubba I tested had a 320GB drive. The device comes with a short Category 5 cable, power supply, and power cord. Bubba is much more than auxiliary storage, though that it one of its many functions. It's a real server, perfect for home or small business LAN needs. Bubba serves mail, FTP, HTML, backups, streaming media, and printing. It can also handle HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent file downloads for you. If that's not enough, Bubba runs Debian Sarge and functions as a standalone computer. What makes Bubba different from other servers? First, ease of use. You can do all of these things without being a system administrator. In fact, that's the whole point of Bubba -- to provide services to ordinary home users in a way they'll be comfortable with. Second, it's cute, and it has more functionality packed into a small space than ought to be street-legal. Could such a small device really do server duty? I quickly followed the enclosed directions, connected Bubba to my OpenWRT-powered Linksys router, and powered it up. Bubba sat there and blinked at me with its single LED for about a minute. When the blinking stopped, and the light remained steady, it was time for me to see if Bubba had connected to my LAN. Still following the instructions, I entered "bubba" as the URL in my Firefox browser and pressed Enter, and there I was, on Bubba's welcome page. For those whose connection attempts are not that smooth, the Bubba documentation explains in detail how to connect to Bubba from a PC. In fact, the documentation explains it three times: once for Windows users, once for Mac users, and once for Linux users.

Meet my Server, Bubba [via: linux]