November 4, 1999 Web posted at: 9:17 a.m. EST (1417 GMT) by Rawn Shah

From...

(IDG) -- The demand for Internet appliances is going up as high-speed connections, home offices, telecommuting, and remote access services are becoming more and more a part of our working lives.

Although a number of Internet client appliances, like WebTV, are making it into our homes, a home office or small business requires a lot more. Such an environment needs an Internet server appliance, a low-cost device that provides all the Internet services one could want without making it necessary to learn a complex system like Unix or Windows NT.

Rebel.com has just such a product that we think has almost all these features running on top of a stable Linux platform.

The NetWinder is an Internet server appliance designed for the small networks in home offices and small businesses. Starting at $895, the device has simple operating instructions, and is managed entirely through a Web interface.

It competes in the same arena as the Cobalt Networks Qube2 or RaQ2 and the Penguin Computing 1U rackmount system, although the NetWinder is smaller than the others. It does not compete with devices like WebTV that are used mostly as client appliances and have much lower price points.

The NetWinder may also be the most exotic of these systems, because it is the first to use the StrongARM processor that was originally developed by Digital and ARM, and is now licensed from Intel. The NetWinder uses the StrongARM SA-110 running at 275 MHz.

Because of its low price tag and reasonable performance, network computer vendors had once pinned their hopes on the StrongARM. Unfortunately, the market never turned out for them and the StrongARM has languished because of it.

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I have to say that the NetWinder merges style with practicality when it comes to the exterior design. Other Internet appliances, such as those from Sun Microsystems, are artistically interesting but almost clumsy for the desktop.

The NetWinder is basically a small, flat rectangle, not much larger than a thin textbook, that has a slight curve in the front and lots of ports in the back. It can sit horizontally or on a stand on its side, thus saving desktop space. The entire unit weighs just over 2 pounds and consumes a miniscule 15 watts of power.

The machine normally needs only a network connection for access, but you can also hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor to directly manage the machine, should the server appliance become inaccessible over the network. There is also a 9 pin serial port and a 25 pin parallel port on the back to attach other devices, such as modems or printers.

There are two Ethernet ports on the back of the device: one at 10/100 Mbps, intended for connection to your LAN, and the other at 10 Mbps only, for attachment to a DSL modem, a cable modem, or an ISDN terminal adapter.

The serial port is available if you plan to hook up an analog 56 Kbps modem instead. You can then set up routing and firewalling between the interfaces.

Installation

Installing the system is a matter of plugging it into the network and powering it up. Initially, you need to use the supplied Java software and HTML page on floppy to locate the NetWinder on the network. The NetWinder itself scans the network for an IP address on your local network that is not actively in use by any other host.

Thus, the automatically assigned IP address shows up in the basic configuration. The software is smart enough to figure out not just this address but also that of the preferred gateway and the DNS server. I'm not sure what method it uses to determine this information, and I don't care. It seems to work without a hitch on a small network.

When the NetWinder is detected by the setup program, it displays the initially assigned address information, which you can alter to fit your needs. Once this information is activated, the device reboots and is then accessible directly from the address assigned to it.

Pointing your browser to the newly assigned address, you are shown the basic user interface. A link on the bottom will take you to the administration interface, which requires a name and password.

This little machine is a wonder of features. It is an NFS, AppleTalk, and Windows file server, a DNS server, a DHCP server, a print server, an SMTP, POP, and IMAP email server, a discussion group server, a Telnet server, an FTP server, a search engine, and, of course, a Web server. It can also act as a firewall and a port forwarder when you connect your internal network to the Internet.

The variety of services the NetWinder provides puts it ahead of the Cobalt products. It shouldn't come as a surprise that all these services are already available for Linux, but to see this little unassuming machine handle them all boggles the mind.

The machine supports both virtual FTP and virtual Web services, with which you can assign several FTP or Web addresses (e.g., both www.site1.com and www.site2.com) to the same machine, and make them appear as separate sites to the user. It does not support virtual email domains whereby multiple users can have the same email address, each for a different domain; thus, rawn@site1.com and rawn@site2.com would go to two different email accounts. POP and IMAP email download accounts are based simply on each user's account.

One other useful NetWinder tool gives users the ability to build their own portals for their network. The Infoplace document organizer has all the tools necessary to create a new portal that your users can either have for themselves or share with others. Users can directly create the portal themselves, but they need the help of the system administrator to allow access by other users. This added value really measures up when you consider the amount that purchasing a separate portal-development tool and server costs.

NetWinder has an interesting approach to doing system backups: it saves them to the machine that you use to access the NetWinder via the Web browser. The backup format is a proprietary method that works only with NetWinders, and is a controversial method of backing up data. You should only do this on a Web browser client machine with ample storage for the contents of the NetWinder, preferably one with an actual tape drive or other backup hardware device.

Backups should always be done from the same machine, or administrators will get confused about where they left the last backup. On the other hand, this backup method does bypass the need for a commercial backup tool like Legato Networker, thus saving on costs.

The network file services can support any Unix, Windows, or Mac OS clients. This in itself makes the product worth its weight in gold. Other commercial packages that do the same will cost you several hundred dollars in software alone.

The product implements all these services over TCP/IP (NFS, AppleTalk-DDP/IP and NetBIOS/IP); that means that your clients also have to have TCP/IP installed, but, fortunately, this has practically become the default networking protocol these days.

For Windows clients it implements a version of Samba, and has parameters which need to be configured by the user, particularly information about the workgroup to which the device belongs. AppleTalk is self-configuring, and thus does not need any parameters.

All network shares are handled by the Share Manager in the Network panel. It bases access control on user accounts and passwords. It does include a parameter whereby you can enter options for the NFS protocol. AppleTalk and NetBIOS sharing do not require any special parameters.

The Firewall Services panel provides a list of rules on how to process incoming, forwarded, and output packets. The base set of rules is provided and configured according to the network interface addresses. You can also add other rules for specific hosts or networks to allow or deny access. This is essentially a nice visual interface to Rusty Russell's ipchains firewall software, the de facto standard firewall application for Linux.

The Port Forwarding panel allows you to create simple proxy services for internal hosts that need to allow incoming connections from external hosts. You simply indicate the two sets of host addresses and ports through which they should communicate, using either TCP or UDP. This service works on a one-to-one mapping between one address/port set and another, but not on more complex ranges of port addresses.

Although the administration menu shows a panel for VPN services, this feature is currently not available. My guess is that Rebel.com is waiting for IPSec to develop to the point at which it becomes widely available and stable for Linux before incorporating it into the product.

The help system is context sensitive and pops up a window describing the panel with which you are working. You can navigate to the help screens for any other panel through links. The help information itself is intended for nonexperts and, via screen shots, tries to explain as much as possible without getting into esoteric detail and confusing the user.

The user account and group membership system is simply the basic Linux user system. Each account created is saved in the /etc/passwd file, as usual.

It also has all the same limitations as the traditional Unix/Linux account model: you cannot specify time-of-day access limits, separate accounts for each virtual domain, or individual user policies. These same problems exist in practically all Linux systems.

Now, if only the NetWinder had an LDAP directory and account system, I'd drop on my knees and worship it.

This machine isn't the fastest computational device on the market. An attempt to compile the GNU compilers (gcc-2.95.1) took 147 minutes and 30 seconds. A 400 MHz Intel Celeron with 64 MB of RAM also running Linux, on the other hand, took only an hour, and a similar machine with 128 MB took only 33 minutes.

In any case, lightning speed shouldn't be your goal for using this machine. You can certainly run Web sites on it -- just preferably not ones with heavy CGI or server-side processing needs.

This device is not a performance demon, so you should not use it when heavy file sharing, computation, or network usage is required. I wouldn't hook up 50 client machines to this server for any type of duty. At best, it should service the needs of 5 to 15 clients well.

It's a light detail server that performs marvelously as such.

The model we tested costs $1,450, and comes with 64 MB of RAM and a 6 GB hard disk drive. The smallest model comes with 32 MB and a 4 GB drive, and costs $895. The top-of-the-line model has 128 MB and 10 GB of drive storage, and costs $1,995.

The higher prices are due to a combination of increased memory prices and the need to use more expensive laptop disk drives rather than the much larger but cheaper desktop drives.

The NetWinder is one of the best implementations of a philosophy for an Internet server appliance I've seen. Such a device should be simple to set up, simple to use, and provide all the services you might want. The NetWinder pulls this off to near perfection for the small-business and home-office markets.

The $1,500 price point is in step with or better than other Internet server appliances, the depth of services is nearly 100 percent complete, and it has a Web interface that is clear and concise for users and administrators. Other than potential additions of a faster processor and LDAP and VPN services, this is one of the best products out there for this market.