The Aries, an Internet Appliance for the Small Business

E-mail servers, Web servers, firewalls, wireless access points, routers, you name it, and you'll find some combination of these services in many of the Internet appliances out there. One such entry in this marketplace is the Aires, by Celestix (www.celestix.com).

We took the Aries for a test ride in our office to see just how well it worked. We connected it to our Netgear FS116 16 port switch, which in turn had our FreeBSD, W2K, Windows NT Server and Win 95 and Win 98 connected in turn. With our little network connected, we wanted to see if we could get the Aires up and running, as well as provide us with all our necessary services for our small office.

We had a little problem configuring the system to start with, mostly because as reviewers, we get pre-used units. But I must say, technical support returned our phone call promptly and told us how to reset the unit. In fact, technical support was just plain efficient. They answered this question and several others with clear, simple instructions.

Once we reset the Aries back to "factory new" we just followed the instructions included and were able to get the system working in about 15 to 20 minutes. But, as usual, we put the cart before the horse... The Aries, like most of its competitors is based on Unix, in this case a customized Linux kernel (2.2.16).

Included within this small little box (measuring 172 mm x 109 mm x 147 mm) is a 300-MHz Geode GX1 processor and (depending on the unit) either 64 or 128 MB of RAM and 10 or 20 GB of hard disk storage (the Aries 310 has the lower values, the Aries 320 the higher). Not to be outdone, the box has a 10/100 TX and 10 Base-T TX adapters, EPP/ECP printer port, RS232 serial port, (2) USB connectors, Infrared port, VGA adapter, and a PS/2 adapter, as well as (2) PCMIA slots. Oops, forgot the most import hardware--(3) Stereo jacks (in, out, and mic). Let's not forget the expansion kit for wireless access (which we also did not test).

On the software side, the Aries includes DHCP, NAT, DNS, Sendmail, POP3, IMAP4, firewall and Apache servers. It's able to support DSL, cable modems, dial-up (serial modem or ISDN modem) connections and VPNs. So with this little baby you should be able to make that Internet connection wherever you may be.

All these services can support Microsoft clients, UNIX/Linux clients and Mac Clients (not tested). Celestrix even claims the Aries speaks traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. I stuck with English.

Administration of this system was provided by what we considered to be a limited Web administration page. For most small businesses it probably will probably meet their needs, but we felt it was slow and lacking in the ability to fully customize the services the Aries provides. While we felt we could have done some of this customization via command line (through Telnet, another server daemon provided by the operating system), we were not sure how it would affect the Web administration pages.

After we were operational, we put the Aries through its paces, and it performed every aspect competently. The e-mail server worked, the Web server worked, FTP worked, even the VPN. Our biggest misgiving was the limited firewall administration. We were unable to specify specific ports/protocols to let through the firewall. This could cause a problem for those of you who use PCAnywhere.

Overall, a very nice unit indeed.

Wayne Spivak is the president of SBA Consulting Ltd. of Bellmore, N.Y.