Sheeva Plug arrived!

[jhu]

Nifty little device. I don't really have a use for this thing, but it was a relatively cheap thing to play around with. I might turn it into a file server. Anyone else have one? What do you do with it?

 

[aceO07]

Wow. Very interesting. Never heard of it before. I'd love to know more about this thing as well. What version did you get? Wonder if you can get more RAM onto it. (Nevermind, there's only 1 version of Sheeva Plug.)

http://www.plugcomputer.org/index.php, If anybody else is wondering what jhu's talking about.

I'm sure this would be a nice distraction or server for someone with more free time. (Unfortunately I just started on a new project.)

 

[richierich1212]

looks cool. What can you do with the OS?

 

[richierich1212]

Guruplug looks awesome.

 

[wtarreau]

Guruplug looks awesome.

WARNING! This device has major heating issues, as reported by all owners, for instance, here : http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1735.0

Even when idle, the guruplug quickly become untouchable (more than 70-80 °C on external metal parts) and owners report early failures after 1-3 months. The power supplies have been replaced in recent boxes (including mine) but the fault is the global thermal design, consisting in gathering all the heat from the CPU, RAM and Ethernet chip on a small alumnium plate which has no contact with air nor outside, as is visible here : http://1wt.eu/articles/guruplug-slow-heater/

Also, the board inside indicates "SheevaPlug 2L", which means that not much has changed.

Also the build quality is very disappointing, especially the wires which break that easily. And I'm not even speaking about the buggy build of the U-Boot bootloader which, when fixed, won't boot the original kernel anymore :-/ The whole thing was made by amateurs.

I've read that GlobalScale (who builds them for Marvell) has announced a major redesign with an external PSU. I hope they will at least use the free space to put a huge heatsink and very large openings in the case.

What I also find very dishonnest from the vendor is that they constantly claim that there is a huge demand, explaining the delays, while they're in fact redesigning it to try to fix their mistakes. For mine which I bought via NewIT (nice team BTW), they were telling us that the iceland volcano was delaying shipping while they were re-opening the boxes to replace the PSUs. That way they could gain one month without officially reporting the issue.

Mine was meant to replace an old NSLU2 server, and given the huge heat and big risk of fire when I'm not here, it's only a useless brick right now :-(

Willy

 

[aceO07]

That doesn't sound good. Hopefully their next version will have (better) heatsinks. Definitely a nice idea if done right.

 

[Zap]

Woot! has the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar today for $20. The internals may be similar to the Sheeva Plug, albeit with 1/4 the RAM.