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Comment by kh_hk | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the demo I noticed it looks like this "prepper disk" that was submitted days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790409

Makes me think the prepper disk was maybe a rebrand of internet in a box without proper attribution?

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> PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access.

> https://www.404media.co/sales-of-hard-drives-prepper-disk-fo...

From the hn-thread. You might be right.

We are actually IIAB partners, we attribute to all the various OOS projects (Kiwix, IIAB)in our credits and comply with all the licensing. Our goal was just to make those packages polished as a consumer product and add newer content (some licensed and some commissioned ).

Curious why you went with a 512GB SD card for the Prepperdisk, instead of a usb drive? I guess it might make the enclosure bigger, but every RPi thing I have built has been undone by SD card corruption (unless I used the overlay filesystem).

These things shouldn't need writable FS though.

Good question. Cost and ease of use were the primary drivers. It’s a read-heavy / write-light which means we came expect more life than some use cases. Alternatively we went with nvme on the 1TB/LLM model due to its heavier write profile. Making a backup of the SD card is wise though as a backup.

And yet there's neither mention of projects over https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/about-us

Yeah, the only mention I can find of many of the open-source projects they use seems to be in one of the FAQs.

And even with you writing that it was not easy to find because its under an unrelated topic.

Good feedback. Most of our customers are shopping for a turnkey device and we try not to include prominent details that can confuse that use cases. But we are going to elevate the content for folks that would be interested (today).

I asked Kiwix and Marc replied and said they are indeed affiliated. Marc also stated they offered help and are pretty cool guys.

Thanks! That makes me feel better

I'm not really sure I understand how a "Prepper Box" is different from an external hard drive. Unlike the devices in TFA, which are meant for many students in a classroom using at once, this seems to be more of a single-person-looking-up-things concept.

Raspberry Pis that have a Wi-Fi module with Access Point support are a good solution for the classroom use case.

Some good Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) testing on RPi 3 B+ & RPi 4 boards on # of Wi-Fi clients supported: https://github.com/iiab/iiab/issues/823#issuecomment-6622852..., e.g., up to 32 clients in certain scenarios.

More info here: https://wiki.iiab.io/go/FAQ#What_hardware_should_I_use? and https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/3010

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