Slashdot Mirror
Axentra Rumba Server - Home Do-It-All Box
JigSaw writes "OSNews has an exclusive article on a new Linux-based server appliance product -- the first in the family -- the Axentra Rumba Server. The product is to be launched soon, but details of it have being leaked out already: The device has a mini ITX mobo, VIA C3 800 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hdd, USB 1.1, 2 LAN ports and in 1 WAN port (extra Wi-Fi USB device required). The device is useful as an Internet Gateway (DNS, IP filtering, Port forwarding, NAT firewall), as a network service (web server, file server, WebDAV, IMAP/SMTP, Samba, Content/Spam Filtering, photo album). It has an embedded web server so you can administer it via your web browser. It is compatible with Linux, Macs and Windows."
This seems like a pretty cool little device. Maybe with appliances like these more people will start to get interested in hosting their own website on their DSL/Cable connection, or doing other "server" type stuff. I really dislike how the Internet today is seen as just a place to visit web pages. Maybe with a simple server appliance people will get the idea that they can publish stuff on the web and share stuff with their friends and family that way. They could even have it run things like a jabber server. Wouldn't that be cool? What this company would do if they were smart is automatically give everyone who buys one of these a dynamic DNS account, so your little server could have its own permanent address with no configuration necessary.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
having used the VIA motherboards, I can say they are unfit for any moderate-duty, web-server work. They are inferior to the Celeron, and even the Celeron is unfit for the job. USB 1.1 is unacceptable now. At least 2.0, or Firewire 800 would be better. Anyone who would be able to set one up as a Gateway or have the knowledge to set up a relatively secure server would be able to build one for themselves for a good amount (probably much less than what that item will sell for, though there is no price yet.)
A blog like any other.
Definitely cheaper, and by my reckoning, better by far. Better in the sense that you could put that wasted hard drive money into RAM. If the thing is to act as a server you don't want it reading off a hard drive anyway. Skip the hard drive and add a Gig of RAM and you could still be less than two hundred bucks with all new parts. If someone bought one of these and then you showed them the right way to do it with a LiveCD, they'd feel like they had been ripped off.
Once you get past ten gigs or so, the real purpose of a hard drive becomes juke box or media management center as opposed to old fashioned computing. This thing is obviously marketed as a server and not as a media device so the 20gig drive is essentially just a way to get rid of old inventory. Sure it's cool because it's GNU/Linux, but let's not get carried away just for that. It's not important to have Best Buy and Circuit City prostletyze Open Source, it really doesn't fit in their scummy bag of sales tricks and they will just make it look like a rip off with misfit products like this. Product placement is life and death in the market, but strictly speaking GNU/Linux isn't in the market since it's available for free as in beer. I believe that is its primary strength.
But speaking of prostletyzing, I digress. Back to the topic of using dated hardware appropriately, I think Murdoch has a better use for those old hard drives which is to use the next generation of video compression to make them look like fat PVRs. At least it's an efficient use of an outdated technology rather than pawning them off as "server" use.
What I would like is that Via come out with some more powerfull proccessors. Their 1 gig is only about equal to a 700 celeron, and depending on what it is actually doing it can get beat out with a 300Mhz pentium in bench marks.
I love the small formfactor stuff. If you got a vid card, sound card, networking card, and 1 or 2 pci slots, what more do you need for a desktop computer??
And I was wanting to build one, but a 2.2ghz celeron with a low-end mini-atx motherboard is cheaper then a mini-ITX 800mhz C3 motherboard and 10x more capable.
just buy a efficiant fan, underclock/undervolt the cpu and get a nice heatsink and you'll be able to make it as quiet as any C3, except for the fanless ones.
If the idea behind this thing becomes popular, it's a matter of time before someone starts knocking out something similar on the cheap. All-in-one mobos are cheap as chips, and drivers don't seem to be as much of a problem as they used to be anymore. Stick one in a case, add a hard drive and maybe a DVD-ROM and pop your favourite distro on it. If it has TV-out, supply a SCART to phono and 3.5mm stereo lead {you may have to solder this yourself} and it'll run into any modern enough telly. A TV receiver / video capture card would make it into a tapeless VCR.
It might need a console-based configuration utility for setting its IP address. Once that's done, and the machine is on a network, everything else can be done through a web browser with a bit of p(hp|erl|ython) scripting.
It could firewall off your vulnerable Windows boxes from your ADSL connection, and provide a proxy to block ad.doubleclick.net and other objectionable sites. No ADSL? Then it can do on-demand dialling. It could collect your e-mail from several different servers and distribute it amongst several desktop machines - you can use POP3 to collect it and thus obviate the need for a static IP address. With the video and audio outputs, it could be a telejuke.
And, because it's programmable, some loon will almost certainly find a use for it none of us have thought of yet.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!