A SOHO Linux Appliance
By Brian Wilson
On a warm summer day in 1981, I tried to drag my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model IV out to the picnic table—too many wires! This year I finally cut the wires. My laptop now connects to an IEEE 802.11b wireless network. I can carry my laptop from home to garden, dropping nary a packet. I can also tap into the Internet and connect to my employer's servers from anywhere at home.
In my home office, I currently have a development Web server, a wireless access point, and a gateway router. That's three boxes, and the server is noisy and power-hungry. And yes, there are still too many wires, and it's hard to configure and maintain. Thus, I see a niche for a product that could roll the features I use into one, simple package—one that would be easy to set up and manage. The same package could be equally useful in a small office.
Celestix has created just such a product. The Aries is a tiny, virtually silent box that can work as a full, Linux-based Web server, a firewall router, and a wireless access point. It has a 200 MHz Cyrix MediaGX (Pentium equivalent) processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 10 GB, 2.5 inch IDE drive. With its external power supply, it weighs 3.5 pounds, less than many of my
Unix books.
Celestix Aries
Network Server
Celestix
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