USB-Powered Linux Server Fits in Your Pocket 252
McSpew writes "A small company from Utah (no, not that one) has announced the BlackDog USB-powered Linux server. It includes a fingerprint reader, a 400MHz PowerPC, 64MB of DRAM and 256MB or 512MB of flash and it runs Debian. The host PC sees it as a CD-ROM drive."
It's not SCO but... (Score:5, Informative)
Correction to article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait wait wait... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correction to article (Score:3, Informative)
It mounts a small partition containing an X11 server for Windows (or your OS of choice), then runs that server and connects to its onboard Linux environment with it.
So yes, it does have quite a bit to do with being seen as a drive by the desktop. Otherwise, your Windows machine wouldn't be able to talk to it.
Re:Wait wait wait... (Score:3, Informative)
My guess is that they have the USB info set so it will be recognized as a USB CD-ROM drive and so they can use Auto-start, if it's enabled, to run their software atomatically.
What little I can gleam from the site tells me that it's the front-end for a bunch of webapps or something to allow you to work with a remote desktop on any web connection.
But that's just a guess since the site is now hosed...
Re:Surprising (Score:1, Informative)
A USB port (on a motherboard) is only specified to deliver 0.2A of current; so @5V that is only 1W.
The PPC in that thing is designed for embedded applications. It has no Altivec, and probably has a lot fewer IPC than the PPC than your iBook. Therefore it makes a lot less heat.
Fran
Re:Possible Uses (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Michael Anderer and Realm (Score:4, Informative)
Realm Systems has secured an additional $9 million dollars in funding on July 7, 2005.
The paper SEC filing, describing the new funding has been secured by penguinistas, and is available at : Debt and bridge financing [rushing.to]
$7.5 MM came from a single unnamed individual.
Frank Artale, an ex-M$FT VP for NT, was appointed chairman of the board of Realm in January, 2005 , when Realm had secured a previous $8 million dollar investment.
Frank Artale and Michael Anderer's stories first become entertwined over Entirenet. Entirenet is a Redmond and Bellevue, Washington based Windows documentation company. Anderer served as nominal CEO of Entirenet in the 2001- 2003 timeframe. Artale, then serving as Veritas VP for Windows had purchased Entirenet for Veritas in March 2001 for an undisclosed ammount.
Anderer, acting as CEO of Entirenet, announced the acquisition of the South Carolina M$FT training firm, HunterStone, in November, 2002.
Artale had left Veritas by March 2003 when his next venture "Consera Software" was announced. Consera had venture funding provided by Ignition Partners, a Seattle venture outfit staffed with a prominent group of ex-M$FT VP's, including Cameron Myhrvold. Myhrvold has especially close ties to Artale.
Anderer left Entirenet about this time.
Frank Artale has continued to work with Ignition Partners. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of Rendition Networks in Sept 2004, as part of a $6 million dollar Ignition investment. Rendition was quickly sold in Dec, 2004.
Other Artale ventures include Therion, sold in May 2005. He has recently added to the Kenai Software board in July 2005 Kenai's executives, e.g. David Mock and Byrren Yates (CFO) overlap Realm's executives and public investors. Artale is considered an expert on the profitable exit sale of start ups. Other Frank Artale endeavors include advisory roles at Zenprise, Centrify, Accel Partners, and formerly a board position at Level 8.
Michael Anderer's continuing relationship with the Seattle-area venture capital organized by highly placed ex-M$FT VP's indicates his reputation has survived the Halloween memo release.
Here's the point... (Score:3, Informative)
The idea is that you carry your computer around with you, session and all. You can use any PC (with Windows, Linux, BSD,
Be in the middle of a session at work. Unplug it, go home, plug it in. You're right back in your session. Unplug, go to class, plug in, ditto. Unplug, go to library, plug in. Unplug, go to iternet cafe, plug in. Unplug, go to China, plug in...
If you were editing a document it's ready for the next keystroke. If you were reading mail you're still in the mail reader, still looking at the same letter at the same point in the scroll buffer. If you were browsing the web you are still on the same page with the same brower history. And so on. Your files came with you. Your state came with you. Your whole computer came with you - or at least the parts of it that are important for preserving your state. Screen, keyboard, mouse, video card, internet connection - use whatever is handy. They're heavy. They'll work just fine for this service for several generations after the machine they are attached to went obsolete. Why buy new ones? Why tie yourself to a particular one at a particular site?
Pull it out, it senses the loss of connection and saves anything still in RAM to a non-volatile memory (flash or disk if they can get it) before it runs out of the power in the onboard capacitor. Plug it in and it boots up, recovers state, and sweet-talks the new machine into giving it a full-screen window and the use of keyboard, mouse, and comm stack.
The designers brought this out for licensing to manufacturers (using a slightly-hacked BSD onboard) over a year ago. I saw their booth at Supercom in Las Vegas back then. (Target was to make the small config for under $100 in bulk for schoolkids, maybe $200 in a big one with postage-stamp hard drive for the rest of us.) It's nice to see a version finally on the market - and with Linux yet.
Re:Correction to article (Score:5, Informative)
(disclaimer: I am an employee of Realm Systems but do not speak for the company)
[1] obviously useful only for Windows hosts, since Linux hosts will almost always have an X server running already.
Re:Surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cool Alarm (Score:4, Informative)
Despite the summary claiming the device appears as a CD-ROM, it also appears to the host as a network device (masquerading as a ethernet-over-USB dongle). Sounds to me like it might be downright handy for your application.
SCO Link? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Michael Anderer and Realm (Score:3, Informative)
Or i'll do one better, repeat the whole post here:
Cut from an AC post:
Michael E. Anderer, of the SCOX "Halloween" memo fame is the CTO of Realm Systems. His old homepage "S2 consulting" hosted the developer forum for Realm. A number of other M$FT links raise the disturbing question if this product is real or elaborate "opposition" research on the part of Redmond.
Realm Systems has secured an additional $9 million dollars in funding on July 7, 2005.
The paper SEC filing, describing the new funding has been secured by penguinistas, and is available at : Debt and bridge financing
$7.5 MM came from a single unnamed individual.
Frank Artale, an ex-M$FT VP for NT, was appointed chairman of the board of Realm in January, 2005 , when Realm had secured a previous $8 million dollar investment.
Frank Artale and Michael Anderer's stories first become entertwined over Entirenet. Entirenet is a Redmond and Bellevue, Washington based Windows documentation company. Anderer served as nominal CEO of Entirenet in the 2001- 2003 timeframe. Artale, then serving as Veritas VP for Windows had purchased Entirenet for Veritas in March 2001 for an undisclosed ammount.
Anderer, acting as CEO of Entirenet, announced the acquisition of the South Carolina M$FT training firm, HunterStone, in November, 2002.
Artale had left Veritas by March 2003 when his next venture "Consera Software" was announced. Consera had venture funding provided by Ignition Partners, a Seattle venture outfit staffed with a prominent group of ex-M$FT VP's, including Cameron Myhrvold. Myhrvold has especially close ties to Artale.
Anderer left Entirenet about this time.
Frank Artale has continued to work with Ignition Partners. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of Rendition Networks in Sept 2004, as part of a $6 million dollar Ignition investment. Rendition was quickly sold in Dec, 2004.
Other Artale ventures include Therion, sold in May 2005. He has recently added to the Kenai Software board in July 2005 Kenai's executives, e.g. David Mock and Byrren Yates (CFO) overlap Realm's executives and public investors. Artale is considered an expert on the profitable exit sale of start ups. Other Frank Artale endeavors include advisory roles at Zenprise, Centrify, Accel Partners, and formerly a board position at Level 8.
Michael Anderer's continuing relationship with the Seattle-area venture capital organized by highly placed ex-M$FT VP's indicates his reputation has survived the Halloween memo release.
Re:Surprising (Score:2, Informative)
This is of course after getting control of the PC using the CDROM and autorun and deploying the X server and the user space NAT to give the device access to the networks that the PC can see.
It and the PC are then peers on their own IP routed ethernet over USB network. No need for silly FAT32. It uses Samba to export whatever you like to the PC.
It could also deploy VNC or any other terminal client if you like, but X11 is most direct. The apps themselves can be the ones it's running or ones that it automatically connects through to in the back.
It can open an IPsec VPN session that only it sees, the host PC only routing the traffic, but not able to interpret it. It can then get access to back-end services without exposing them to the PC's vulnerabilities.
Re:Marketing Magic? (Score:2, Informative)
It can be used to provide the authentication tokens and connect to back end terminal servers (of any odd type).
Re:Correction to article (Score:4, Informative)
This is an incredibly flexible device. You can change almost anything about it. Heck, if you're up to hacking kernel drivers, you can make it emulate ANY USB device. Thus far, we've had call for emulating CD-ROM and ethernet-over-USB. But there's no reason it can't appear to the host as a mass storage device. Or a keyboard (take *that*, keyloggers!). Or a serial port dongle. Or... anything USB at all.
None of this flexibility, alas, will make any Linux distro in the world dumb enough to autorun software just because somebody presented a CD-ROM, unlike another certain popular OS. So autorunning on a Linux host requires a hotplug script be installed. We provide samples for some major distros and assume that the guy running Gentoo is smart enough to hack his own hotplug (or just run a
OS-X support is "coming soon", i.e. we plan to support it, have done nothing to prevent it working, but haven't yet spent any test cycles on it. Having got it working with the incredibly balky USB stacks in Windows and Linux, I have no doubt it will be made to work just fine.
(again, *not* an official spokesman for the company, not legally binding, don't sue me please, yadda yadda.)