Axentra Net-Box Home Network Appliance
By Alexander Grundner |
January 27th, 2005
Comments (1)
The one box to rule them all. Is the Axentra Net-Box the all-in-one device D-Link’s CEO was predicting back in December? Not sure if it is or not, but the Axenta has already won several awards this month at CES for creating a Windows/Linux/Mac compatible device that functions as an Internet gateway, firewall, 802.11g access point, and web/email/file server. Seriously, what more can you ask for, right? The only bummer is that the initial offering comes up a little short on built-in storage (two versions: H-70 $499/80GB and H-90 $699/160GB). But if it’s any consolation, users can easily add external USB 2.0 storage drives as needed.
Features:
- Set up your home network in just a few minutes with Net-Box’s wizard driven setup
- Easily manage your entire home network from one integrated web-based toolbox
- Network all your computers together (Net-Box is Windows, Mac and Linux compatible)
- Expand your network with built-in wireless (802.11g) access point features
- Share your broadband connection among all your computers
- Create and control your own email addresses
- Keep hackers and spammers away from your network and your email
- Host your website and publish your photos and videos to the world
- Share your printers among all your computers
- Backup and synchronize your desktop files with your Net-Box
- Access your files from anywhere from any platform
- Enjoy a fully integrated web-based productivity suite featuring email, contacts, calendar, file management, file sharing, photo publishing, notes and more!
- Use any IMAP email clients and LDAP PIM applications such as MS-Outlook, MS-Entourage, Netscape, Eudora Mail, or Mozilla to connect to your Net-Box’s email and address book server
April 10th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Axentra discontinued the NetBox servers in Dec. 2005, they still
sell the software to install on a pc. That is on a PC with ata drives,
not sata or scsi.
Other posts objected to the price, the H-70 was $500, later
$300 when they were closing them out. Sure, you can install
Linux, Windows, etc. and try to implement all of the features
of the NetBox , but it will take a lot of time, and try to
get a good Webmail program working, along with file sharing,
email, web server, automatic lan pc backups, blogs, dynamic
dns, etc. SME server was one that I had done, but it
lacks many of the features.
I had a Cobalt Qube2 and 3 for a while, they had a few of
the NetBox features, but were $2000 back in their day.
They had good following, now you can get them for
$100-$300 but no more parts/support, and the OS and apps
are dated.
Another objection is that it only has 1 lan port. So buy a
5 or 8 or 24 port 100mb. switch, it will only cost you 30–100bucks.
I was very disappointed when Axentra quit selling the servers.
With better marketing, it would have been a winner for
small businesses and home office/business use.
The only drawbacks that I saw were non-redundant power supply and hard drive, altho you could copy your data to a external
usb hard drive.
There really isn’t / wasn’t any competition, there have been
a few server appliances with similar functionality in the
$2000+ range.
What would it cost to buy a pc/server and MS SBS, and
then to install/configure it, etc?
Looks like maybe there isn’t / wasn’t market demand for
these network server appliances.