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If you've been wanting to set up a home server for backing up files, streaming music or corralling e-mail, but haven't made the leap because it seemed complicated, cost too much or would be an added drain on your electricity, Excito's Bubba Two Linux server might be the answer you've been seeking.
The original Bubba was released last year and received widespread acclaim in Linux circles, but many found the small processor and lack of RAM limiting factors. To address those issues Excito recent released the Bubba Two, which offers twice the RAM of its predecessor.
However, despite the bump in hardware, be aware that the Bubba Two is not by any means the most powerful NAS server out there. What gives Bubba Two an edge over more powerful devices is its low watt, power sipping energy requirements and its very cool browser-based management system which effectively removes the Linux from Linux, something those without a degree in network engineering will likely apprieciate.
But the Bubba Two isn't just about low-power LAN-based backups, it's actually much more than auxiliary storage -- it's a real server, and can handle just about any home or small business LAN needs.
The Bubba Two acts as an e-mail, FTP, print and web server, can handle file backups, streaming media and can also be a LAN hub and firewall. It also has a barebones download client that can handle HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent file downloads.
While the Bubba Two's strong-suit is its easy-to-use web interface, which makes backing up and serving files dead simple, it also runs a full-fledged Debian Sarge install under the hood. For the Linux savvy Bubba's potential is nearly unlimited.
Excito recently sent out a Bubba Two for us to test out and its been running on our home network for several weeks now. We've found that while our old server (an old P4 box running Fedora 6) is undenaible more powerful, the Bubba Two is simplier, quieter, easier on the power bill and frankly, more fun.
Our review copy of the Bubba Two was surprisingly small -- not much bigger than an IDE drive -- but heavy, weighing in at almost four pounds. Getting the Bubba up and running was simply a matter of plugging it in and connecting the network cable.
Once the little blue light came on we were immediately able to connect via the web at the Bubba Two's default address http://bubba/. While the web interface is very slick, when it comes to backing up or transfering files over your network you'll probably want to just mount the Bubba Two in your file manager. We tested and had no problems mounting the Bubba Two in Linux, Windows or OS X.
Once Bubba Two was mounted, interacting with it was no different than with an attached drive, thanks to Samba -- just drag and drop files in either direction.
One of the Bubba Two's standout features is its ability to stream music to iTunes-compatible music players on your LAN. Setting that up was a snap, we just copied our music files over the Bubba and told iTunes to look for shared music. If you're using another media player, the process is the same, just point your media player (we tested Banshee on our Linux laptop as well and had no issues).
But the main reason we were interested in Bubba was its rumored ability to run Slimserver, the music streaming app that powers our Squeezebox. At the time of this writing Bubba Two can't run Slimserver out of the box, however, Excito has been promising a plugin for some time. The latest word is that Slimserver will be released in plugin form some time before the end of 2008.
Of course the Bubba Two is running Debian and there's a version of Slimserver available for Linux, so we attempted to install it ourselves. The result was hours of frustration (not the Bubba Two's fault really), but in the end we did get it running albeit with the ooccasional crash. if you're interested in running Slimserver on a Bubba Two for a low-power, always-on music server, it's probably worth waiting for the official plugin.
Another very cool aspect of the Bubba Two is the Bittorrent download manager. Log in through the web interface, click on Downloads, enter the URL for the download, and click Add. From there the Bubba Two does the rest, including a nice page for monitoring your download progress and showing various network stats.
Unfortunately the Bubba Two's download client is rather minimalist -- there's no way to control bandwidth usage, control what sort of peers you connect to or anything else. In fact, the download client is pretty much just a file upload form that then shows a progress bar.
It works just fine for FTP/HTTP downloads, but with bittorrent files it leaves much to be desired. But again, Debian can help and the Linux savvy won't have any trouble installing rTorrent, which offers some more advanced controls and has been happily downloading and seeding all our torrents for weeks now.
Another area Bubba Two excells ar is handling e-mail. If you've got mail accounts on a variety of servers -- POP3 or IMAP -- keeping track of all of them in your e-mail client can be a pain. But with the Bubba, it's simple to aggregate all your e-mail to one server.
To set up Bubba to handle your e-mail, just head to the web admin and click Mail. Then just fill in the same account information that you would enter to configure a normal email client. Once you have all your accounts setup the Bubba Two will collect and store your email, and you can access it at http://bubba/webmail or set up your e-mail client to connect to Bubba's IMAP server.
Given that the Bubba Two is ripe for experimentation, the ability to easiily recover from screw-ups is key. Fortunately, another of the Bubba's strengths is the ability easily reflash the drive (we got quite good at this during our attempts to install Slimserver). To reset your Bubba Two just download the latest bubba.img file from Excito, copy it to a FAT32-formatted USB stick, and plugiin it in to your Bubba Two. Then hold the power button to reflash the drive. It can take a little while and obviously it will erase your data, so make sure you have a backup before experimenting.
The Bubba Two starts at €288 with no drive and runs from there up to 427 for the largest, 1 TB model. At the moment Excito is sold our of the Bubba Two, though the company promises that more stock should arrive later in December.
[1]: http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?t=1127&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=install+rtorrent&start=15
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