It's also really easy to actually perform the updates using Bubba|Two's slick Web management interface. You just point your Web browser at it and can configure a large number of options without ever having to expose yourself to its Linux-flavoured innards. This new model's Web interface is a massive upgrade from the previous version, both aesthetically and functionally.
Back to what I've made Bubba|Two do: downloading. Using a package called Sabnzbd+ (written using a programming language called Python) I've been able to perform USENET newsgroup downloads, verify the validity of the downloading files, and automatically unpack them, placing them in an accessible and sensible place on the network. Using remote command line sessions I've been able to use the command line WGET utility to download files from the Internet. And using GCalCron it's possible to schedule downloads, and an infinite number of other console commands from a familiar interface. Then there's the previously mentioned built in torrent support.
So in a raw processing sense, Bubba|Two is a lot more capable than Bubba|One, but it does have its very obvious limits. You're not going to be able to ask it to do on-the-fly transcoding of video using a 333MHz processor. As I mentioned before, it's probably not going to host your massively popular Web site. It's constrained by its hardware, but it's this very constraint that enables it to do so many things in such an economical manner. I didn't really consider how much power my computers used until I got the first Bubba, and the second generation has made me think about it all over again.
One other very important hardware change between the two devices is support for USB2 and eSATA connections. Bubba|One was equipped with a USB port, but it wasn't USB2, and wasn't really quick enough to be used to mount additional drives. Bubba|Two fixes this, by allowing two eSATA drives to be connected, and presumably more USB2 drives (using a USB Hub). This expands the storage potential dramatically — no longer is Bubba limited by its internal drive (which can be any one of a range of drives, whether self-installed or bought from Excito), but it can be upgraded by adding additional external volumes. What's more, the user can start to build in some fault tolerance by synchronizing files between multiple disk drives on the same device. Excito are even working on software RAID support to make this even easier.
The last key hardware change present is the addition of a second ethernet port. Bubba|Two can act as a router on your network, providing Firewall functionality, DNS, IP address allocation and all the things your ADSL or cable modem quite possibly does for you now. You can place Bubba between your existing hardware and the network, and have it act as additional security, or let it take over from anything you've got now. And if you haven't, why not? It's crazy out there.
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