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Winding Through the Rebel NetWinder

By Bob Kaehms

Some may remember the Netwinder as Corel's foray into the microserver arena a few years back. The Netwinder was sold to Hardware Computer Canada in early 1999. Originally built on an Intel StrongARM 110 processor, Netwinder's recent main hardware changes are the addition of three ethernet ports and a switch to a Transmeta Crusoe processor. Transmeta claims that its processor uses about one quarter the power of conventional processors. (See www.transmeta.com/crusoe/lowpower for details on the chip.)

Not only is a Netwinder small (2"x9.5"x6"), it looks more like a modem than a Web server. What caught my eye was that Netwinder had three built-in Ethernet ports that work as a firewall or VPN disguised as a Linux microserver.

Booting the Boot Program

For setup, pop a CD into a PC that sits on the same network as the Netwinder and autorun takes over. Netwinder should broadcast its existence, letting you use a Java applet on the local PC to configure the Ethernet addresses, and routing and administrative accounts.

NetWinder Office Server Version 2.2 release 1 Rebel.com