My Bubba - Your Bubba

[redw0001]

I have a Bubba2 which I've run for a while now and it has been very good.

I've just seen the Christmas offer from Excito (it just arrived).

I'm very tempted to get one while the offer exists however I have a question...

If you had a Bubba 2 and have moved to a B3 what are the benefits you have seen?

I'm not interested in things like CPU faster, more memory etc, these are facts I can get from the online specs, what I'm interested in is how the change has benefitted you. I'd really appreciate any answers people I've had to help me make my decision.

Thank you, robin

[nobody]

It really depends on what you want to do with it, which you did not specify.
I for example still have a B1 (yes, B1) in active duty as a DNS server. For this purpose it works outstandingly well, but you cannot use it to stream HD video.

So although I can imagine you like everyone here to write essays on how much they like their B#, I suggest you clarify your specifications a bit so that responses are more on-topic

thanks

[redw0001]

Good point nobody, (more haste less speed).

Currently it is used for the following:
1: music server using 5 squeezebox players (squeezeserver as installed)
2: photo storage viewed from PCs at home
3: mail server (thunderbird locally, roundcube when away from home)
4: some video streaming (to a popcornhour)
5: file server for PCs at home

I had planned to share photos with friends but performance has resulted in me giving up. Also to date I've struggled to sort out controlling access effectively - but to be fair I'd not expect that to change.

Other potential uses:
1: Web server - I've toyed with the idea of building a web frontend to make data access easier to use but never got to it following my experience with photo sharing. It will also be an exercise to help me learn php (on my wish list).

Biggest issue I've seen is when moving lots of data to/from the Bubba2 it is not the fastest of devices, it would be nice to get more network throughput when needed if I went for an upgrade.

[Nrde]

it would be nice to get more network throughput when needed if I went for an upgrade.

I use my B3 for the same things, but I haven't had B2 so can't directly compare. When B3 came out, Excito stated that one of the significant improvements was higher network speed. Of course you need your other devices and environment to be more than 100Mbs to see dramatic changes.

[nobody]

The thing with network transfers is hat you actually need some level of cpu and bus speed to get all that data onto and from the nic. The mail server wont need the improvement of the b3, but the streaming processes will enjoy the better cpu, memory and bus speed.

[Gordon]

I've never owned a B2, but as far as photo sharing is concerned I use Singapore myself. This PHP based application uses Imagemagick to scale images on the fly - all you need to do is place raw size images in (a subdirectory of) the image folder and Singapore indexes them, creates thumbnails and web optimized size of the images. Running Imagemagick is slow as hell on the B3, but it runs and gets results and since Singapore doesn't delete the resized images every subsequent visitor will see the image instantly.

0.02

[johannes]

I can give you some pure performance facts; measured as read (from Bx disk to PC on network) or write (from PC on network to Bx disk).

B2: SAMBA maxes out around 10 MByte/s (read) and 6-8 MByte/s (write) on large files
B3: SAMBA maxes out around 45 MByte/s (read) and 27 MByte/s (write) - on large files

FTP, AFP and HTTP is approximately the same, whereas improvements in ssh file transfers are not that much.

Another improvement you will notice is snappier communication with the Squeezebox server - which I always thought was slightly painful with the B2.

[redw0001]

Thank you all,

Trawling though there info plus that posted decision made. Deed done soon I'll have a Bubba2 as a backup/development box

[beeversf]

Could you let me know where you get the singapore php app from? I searched and seem to get primarily photos of Singapore

[beweb]

Aah, your trapped in your google search bubble!

TIP: Use DuckDuckGo or an other search engine that doesn't store your search history
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+singapore+imagemagick

And that gives me for example:
http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/singapore/ which has the orignal source: http://www.sgal.org/

@gordon, thanks for this tip!

[beeversf]

Thanks I'll look into it.

[Gordon]

That's the one Hope you like it.