We talked with an upstart company called Pogoplug who is making a little NAS attachment that takes all the configuration out of doing NAS on LANs and over the net. You plug your external hard drive into their adapter, and then you log onto a website where you enter a code from a sticker on the Pogoplug adapter. Once you enter the code, their web service will take care of IP addresses, NAT transversal, and all the other mysterious crap that makes net-wide NAS a pain in the ass.

Other users can also log onto to the Pogoplug site to have access to files you grant rights to. It’s really swank, and the other cool thing is that this device has an open source API so users can develop new apps for it.

The device is fairly small, too. It’s about the same size as a small laptop power brick.

The Pogoplug NAS unit provides NAS to anywhere with no firewall shens.

Engines have belts, Windows has Winsock, and humans have brains. The relation between all three, of course, is that they’re all apt to get completely fouled up without explanation or prior warning. Significantly in the case of the Windows Sockets API (Winsock), the symptoms of such erratic and unprompted disarray are as varied as snowflakes.

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