Daily Network Monitor

Here’s what our booth looked like yesterday.

The show was a great success yesterday, and I saw a few interesting vendor exhibits.

First up, Finjan. They offer proactive behavior-based detection of malicious content including - Zero-hour protection against vulnerabilities; Anti-Spyware; Anti-Phishing/Pharming; URL Filtering; Anti-Virus. I interviewed one of the team and will be posting his insights later.

Another vendor with a ..different…way of presenting it was Xangati. In their words, “Xangati has developed an innovative solution which uses flow-based information and allows IT personnel to instantly pinpoint user and service abnormalities throughout the entire enterprise”.

Last, but certainly not least were our old Network World friends at Statseeker. If you are looking at REALLY high-end high-end Enterprise Network Performance tools, they deserve a serious look in my opinion.

The Dude network monitor is a new application by MikroTik which can dramatically improve the way you manage your network enviroment. It will automatically scan all devices within specified subnets, draw and layout a map of your networks, monitor services of your devices and alert you in case some service has problems.

Some of it’s features:

* The Dude is free of charge!
* Auto network discovery and layout
* Discovers any type or brand of device
* Device, Link monitoring, and notifications
* Includes SVG icons for devices, and supports custom icons and backgrounds
* Easy installation and usage
* Allows you to draw your own maps and add custom devices
* Supports SNMP, ICMP, DNS and TCP monitoring for devices that support it
* Individual Link usage monitoring and graphs
* Direct access to remote control tools for device management
* Supports remote Dude server and local client
* Runs in Linux Wine enviroment, MacOS Darwine, and Windows
* Best price/value ratio compared to other products (free of charge)

Saw this great blog posting on ZDNet recently…

E-Way Technology Systems is a company from Taiwan that is selling a tiny 200 MHz x86-compatible fanless mini PC with 128 MB RAM, Fast Ethernet, and front loading compact flash slot for $99 at single quantities! Of course this wouldn’t be very useful as a full desktop computer, but it is the perfect low-power fanless zero-moving-part silent appliance at an unbelievably low price. Here are some of the things you can do with this hundred dollar box.

Citrix or Terminal Server thin client (you’ll need to add keyboard, mouse, and a display). By the time you add those things, you might be up to $300 but it’s multiples cheaper than other thin clients.
Small office or home office Asterisk PBX to support a couple of phones and voice mail boxes (So long as you don’t try to transcode anything).
Change to a board with no video and audio but with multiple Ethernet ports and this can become a killer IPCop appliance.
The front loading CF (Compact Flash) slot is super convenient for firmware upgrades since you can easily extract the CF card and flash the image from a regular computer.
It could probably serve as a Linux Wi-Fi appliance as well with an
But this hundred dollar unit is a little under powered and I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a more powerful solution. I went to E-Way’s website and found this 800 MHz fanless mini-ITX system with 256 MB RAM for a mere $199 at single quantities ($150 at 300 units). But even at $199, you can’t even build a mini-ITX system this cheap in component costs alone! Mini-ITX components are usually very expensive.

It doesn’t have the front loading CF slot but it has a PXE boot ROM and very good performance characteristics. This unit can use CF or hard drives in the thicker model. This would probably make the perfect PBX system if it was coupled with something like the Astrabank-8 which is a USB device that provides 8 analog phone ports for analog phones or fax machines. The performance and hard drive would allow it to handle many more users and voice mail boxes.

It could probably handle DVD playback with ease since it has MPEG 2 acceleration though I doubt if it will handle HD video play back. As a media PC, it has limitations because it lacks HD component out and only has a DB-15 VGA port and no DVI. But it would probably make a killer car PC since it doesn’t use a lot of power (no more than 20 watts) and you could hook up an LCD panel to it. It’s small enough to easily mount under the car seat. As a firewall appliance, it would need to have more Ethernet ports though I’m not sure if that’s an option with this mini chassis or not. E-Way does sell 3 and 4 port fanless systems that are perfect for the firewall appliance which may even be fast enough to do in-line virus scanning for a small number of users.