What is a PogoPlug ?  It is part of a new device category for complete Linux Systems On a Chip that allows manufacturers to package a complete Linux computer in form factors that were not available before.  In this case the form factor is the same as a typical power brick.

What can you do with it ?  The PogoPlug is a single purpose appliance that allows you to share a disk drive with your friends and family via the PogoPlug web site.   This implementation gets around most problems involved with personal and hard ware firewalls and provides some degree of security for your data and network.

I installed it created some directories which I shared with some friends.  I put some photos on the attached drive and asked my friends to access them.   When you give someone access to your PogoPlug you must provide thier e-mail address.   The PogoPlug web site then sends them a URL that allows them to have access to what ever you have givent them access to.   So all external access goes through the external Pogo Web site.

I decided to do some experiments with larger files.  So I chose a 4gb video file and attempted to upload it to my PogoPlug from my Laptop.  This didn’t work very well as it was very very slow.  According to my upload dialog it was going to take 32 hours to complete the upload.   So I moved the disk drive to my laptop (a USB drive)  and copied it directly which took about five minutes.

I then put the Disk drive back on the PogoPlug and attempted to download the file from my laptop.  I was pleasantly surpried to see that it worked at almost the same rate as when the drive was plugged in directly to my laptop about seven minutes.  Interesting so I asked one of my friends to download the file over the Internet.   As soon as the download was started my Network became very very slow.  Just opeing the Google web site was taking as much as 2 minutes from my laptop.  So I pulled the plug on the PogoPlug and my network was restored to its former glory.. :)  My friend said the download was going very slowly on his end is download dialog indicating it was going to take more than 24 hours to download the file.

Very interesting.  It appears that the Pogo we site knows when you are on the same network as your Pogo plug and it bypasses the Internet trip in that case.  For a DSL connection though I could not recommend making large files available for download from your PogoPlug.

My next test will be to try and get the Pogo Plug to do more such as acting as a stand alone web server.  Stay tuned for my results….