GuruPlug Kit
Early Adopter, Lifestyle

A $100 Brick?

Yesterday I received my new GuruPlug Server from GlobalScale Technologies and being the “Head First” type of person I am, I went out to their wiki and started running through their “Newbie Getting Started Instructions” and promptly bricked my device!

It turns out that the “Newbie Getting Started Instructions” were for a totally different device with a totally different Linux distribution. So now I’m faced with waiting for GlobalScale Technologies to send me their JTag Serial adapter so I can re-flash the device back to it’s factory settings and start all over again!

I guess in the future I’ll have to take it a little more cautiously, but where would the fun be in that? To me, if you’re going to post a Wiki to support your products maybe you ought to make sure that it is perfectly clear what device the instructions are for and don’t make the assumptions that everybody who is reading your Wiki is going to know the differences.

It looks as if GlobalScale has rushed this product out without much thought, after spending a couple of hours digging through their forums I’m a little skeptical if the device will even live up to my expectations and planned uses. There are numerous threads about heating issues, Wifi and Ethernet connectivity issues as well as boot time problems indicating to me that the product is not really ready for primetime. I’ve also dug through numerous threads where people are trying to make sure they’ve got the latest OS image and from what I can tell, there is no definite answer for that question either.

I guess I’ll have to hold my final verdict until the serial adapter shows up and I can unbrick the device to find out it’s true potential. To me the device could be perfect for all those small little “I just need a device that will do X” type of scenarios, which is why I bought it in the first place.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with looking at it and planning on what I’ll do with it. For those of you interested, here are some pics and the specs for the device.

GuruPlug Standard
  • Marvell Kirkwood 6281, 1.2GHz
  • 512MB 16bit DDR2 RAM, 800MHz
  • 512MB NAND Flash
  • WiFi 802.11 b/g
  • Bluetooth
  • 1 Gigabit Ethernet Port
  • 2 USB 2.0 ports
  • U-SNAP I/O
  • Linux Kernel 2.6.32

 

Ethernet and USB Interface

Serial Connections

Package Contents

Standard
Loading Facebook Comments ...

Got a comment? I'd love to hear it!