While there is a cost to backup to Amazon S3 servers, the cost for the four fairly large websites has been averaging  $0.03 a day – which averages out to $2.74 per site per year!  Definitely worth the peace of mind I’ll be getting from having a secure offsite backup of the website created each night.

The management software is intuitive and easy to use, and provides remote, end-to-end management. It works through a web browser (IE and Firefox), yet feels like you’re standing right in front of the rack. The same interface is used for everything from storage, KVM, and power management.

The designers obviously had the middle-market in mind, because this offering sidesteps all of the issues have made implementing a blade solution in a SMB situation problematic. The system runs on either 110 or 240V AC, eliminating the need for a costly 220-240 UPS upgrade.  At 70 dB maximum sound output, I wouldn’t want it under my desk, but it wouldn’t overwhelm an office.  Running at a fairly cool 75 degrees, it won’t overwhelm the cooling ability of a small equipment room. The availability of the chassis as a pedestal base for situations where there is not a rack available is a first in the blade market, as far as I’m aware.

If the Modular Server had an A/C module, it would truly be a data center in a box, providing everything a small business needed except an Internet connection.  I’m interested to see how it fares against HP’s c-Class blade system, or IBM’s BladeCenter S, which have similar capabilities.  With it’s significantly lower cost than HP and IBM, it’s sure to hit the sweet spot for many SMB customers.

This weekend, however I was at Radio Shack to pick up some cable & a cordless phone to add an extension to my office. As they were having a store closing sale, I thought I’d checkto see if they had Hummer games cheap (they have a C64 on a chip in them, which I want to mod into a working C64 laptop/handheld). Right next to them, they had the Linksys cordless Skype phone. Coincidentilly, the sale price on the Linksys was the same as the spool of cable and the cordless I had in my hands. So I picked up the Linksys, took it home, and gave it whirl. That is, I gave it a whirl after letting it charge…
While letting it charge, I installed the accompanying software. It was a very straightforward install, and I didn’t run into any issues.

After letting it charge for about 1/2 an hour I broke down and tried to make a couple of calls with it – however I kept getting a busy signal – even to numbers I knew were not in use. After 15-20 calls, I finally noticed the Skype software reminding me to dial the + before a SkypeOut call. I’m not sure if it’s the phone or Skype that picked the busy signal as notification for a bad call, but it didn’t give me what I would consider as effective feedback. I do have to say that I get it up and running without even touching the documentation or quick start card, so I probably should have known better.

Call quality was decent – It was easy to forget that I was making VoIP calls. The handset was lighter than a conventional handset and have the feel of an inexpensive cell phone. I made a couple of calls to my voicemail, and listening to them with a landline I was neither impressed nor disappointed with the voice quality.

I’m not aware of any way to get it working under Linux or other Windows telephony software, but hope someone will come up with those hacks soon. I bought it spur of the moment assuming it was Windows and Skype only, so nothing is lost.

Overall, I’m happy with the phone and the service – but I only spent a small fraction of the list price for the phone. In hindsight, I could have saved some dough by spending $35 on a corded USB handset or $20 for a bluetooth adapter so I could have used an existing cell headset with my computer. The wireless functionality and ability to dial from the phone pretty much makes up for the price difference, and I had planned on selling it on Ebay if I didn’t like it. For now, the Linksys has earned a space on my desk – until the next best gadget comes along.

The demo unit I evaluated came as a 1 U rack server, and setting it up was as easy as connecting KVM cables and three ethernet There are several different ways you can set it up (transparent bridging, routing or passive modes), and I set it up in Transparent Bridging mode. The nice thing about this mode, is that the NIC in the box (failover card) is set up with some relays that will switch off if the server loses power, or if the service (it runs Windows 200 server) stops responding, and keep network traffic flowing (bypassing the Lightspeed box, of course).

The image below shows the configuration screen you used once you initialize your setup. The initial setup was fairly easy, although I did have tech support walking me through it over the phone.

From the image, you can click on any one of the components and configure it. Very visual, fairly easy. No complaints as yet.

I’ll follow the chart from top to bottom and give you my impressions of each part:

1) Intrusion Prevention: Here is where the Lightspeed didn’t shine very brightly. Out of the box, the Intrusion prevention feature kept knocking telnet traffic off of the network with an idle time of just over a minute or so. When I called for support they had me disable the feature rather than fix the problem. Tech support said we should be able to get the problem fixed, but I should check out the rest of the system first. I was not impressed. I never came back to fix it, mainly because I wasn’t impressed with the rest of the system.

2) Traffic Limiter: I was not able to see a lot of effect of this portion of the device. It may be because my ISP already limits most P2P traffic, but my speeds downloading from bittorrent (Linux ISO’s of course….) seemed no slower than before.

3) Traffic Priority: This was another feature I did not see a lot of difference from. The image to the right shows the configuration for setting priority. I tried setting certain ports higher and lower (like VNC and secure web traffic) and the difference didn’t seem huge. I have no experience with this area at all, however, and suspect you would need your network to be really hammered for this to make a difference. Because I didn’t get my hands on an eval until the last week of school, my traffic was on the light side.

4) Spam mail blocker: I ran this portion in monitor only mode, as we already have a Barracuda Spam firewall in place. It seemed to catch most of the traffic that the barracuda did, with the biggest difference seeming to be that the Barracuda received hourly updates, while the Lightspeed’s were daily – allowing slightly more spam through the gates.

5) Classification and reporting: This is where the Lightspeed really shines. The reporting was comprehensive and easy to use. Here is an example of the report on busiest protocols:

You could click on a protocol to see the high traffic users/machines, and can limit traffic right from this screen. Next is an example of traffic sorted by inbound bytes:

An by the way – no, I don’t get that much IM traffic on my network – it was a slow day late in the afternoon (after school) and my network traffic was fairly light – making one short IM conversation come out on top.

Overall, I liked the reporting features the best – however, the price I would pay for it wasn’t worth it, in my humble opinion. You can access a demo of live reports at http://reports.lightspeedsystems.com

6) Content filtering: Somehow I have the feeling that the same personality type that wants a gazillion different reports on network usage also wants to lock down access to websites tightly. The filtering out of the box a way too tight for my liking. They filtered all *.blogspot.com domains as “adult” even though they have a “blog” category. I did like the feature they had where you could set up the default page that comes up for a blocked site to allow a user to input their email address and a reason for requesting the page to be unblocked. Even though our ISP filters our connection, we still had ~15 sites to “unblock” in the first day alone. This also reminded me how much I enjoyed not having to make the decision on what to block and what not to. I’m happy to let our ISP handle this, and hand out an email address explaining “It’s out of my control”.

Overall, the box did what it claimed to do fairly well. It isn’t a sophisticated firewall, and someone used to more advanced equipment will be left feeling something is lacking. If I didn’t already own the Barracuda spam firewall, and especially if my ISP didn’t provide filtering for free, this box would be a lot more attractive to me. In addition they just recently changed from per server to a per seat licensing, which makes this system even less desirable to me. A recent email said (in reference to licensing cost): “Along with your inquiry, you indicated that you have between 500 and 1,500 workstations. Based on that, I can tell you that Total Traffic Control is an excellent value for small-to-medium networks if an annual software cost of $10 per workstation ($5,000 minimum) is within your budget.” They claim to have a client software agent that will replace the need for anti-virus and anti-spyware software, but it seemed quite far from prime-time when I checked it out.

Final verdict: Not on my network with my budget – far too rich for my blood.

Quick & Easy to connect: Simply plug into any PCs w/ USB port for Wireless LAN connection or slide in your cell phone’s removable SIM card
- Features Wireless Network connection, allowing networking where other 802.11b devices may be present
- for use on your wireless cellular carrier’s network.
- Provides users w/seamless wireless Internet connection.

At least, enough for someone to set up a Wiki on hacking (or working with open-source firmware ) it at http://terastation.org. As they posted in my comments “Nothing much yet, but it’s a start”. So far it looks like they have a how-to on adding a serial console.

It will be interesting to see what progress they will make – it would be a great mini-server if they get it going!

Here is a list of the main features included with VNCon:

• Computer Switching: Cycles through the list monitoring activity, and allowing you to take control or send a message at the touch of a button
• Password Support : You can specify a default or a specific password for each connection
  
• Grouping Support: Allows you to group sets of computer for easier management
• Multiple Views: Allows multiple computers to be monitored on-screen at once
  
• Remote Installation: Eases deployment of VNC to remote computers running Windows
  
• Remote Messaging: Sends messages to other computers running Windows NT/2K/XP
• Network and IP Scan : Scans the connected windows networks or IP address range for all connected computers
• UserName Scan: Determines the current user logged onto the remote computer
  

It doesn’t look as beefy as commercial offerings like ARD or Vision 5, but it’s free, and open source, which is nice.