The Daily Network Monitor

As you may know, Ipswitch recently partnered with Wiley Publishing to produce Ipswitch Network Monitoring for Dummies by Robert Armstrong. It’s not available in stores or even on Amazon.com, but if you visit us at one of our upcoming events, such as Network World IT Roadmap or Cisco Networkers, you just might get a copy.

When the idea was first floated, I was skeptical. Our customers are far from dummies. Some of them could teach classes on networking. Some probably do. But I was proven wrong (again) by the popular response. People with serious networking credentials love this book! Sure, it’s a tribute to the power of the “Dummies” brand, but it’s also a powerful message about simplicity and clarity.

Networking professionals have complex jobs supporting increasingly complex systems that make businesses run. Never underestimate their need for simple, clear, easy-to-use tools and information. This is a big part of what has made Ipswitch and especially WhatsUp Gold successful - making the complicated things easy, making the easy things effortless, and turning blobs of data into actionable information. This is what’s gotten WhatsUp noticed lately by PC Magazine, PC Pro and CRN, to name just a few.

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.