Feature Tour
To dig deeper, I selected the "Enter device settings" which spawned my browser and connected to a web server running on the box. Figure 4 shows the initial configuration menu that is displayed after the administrator logs in.
Figure 4: Main Menu
Note that the 150d only supports HTTP, not the more secure HTTPS connections. In the Summary display, you can see that my one terabyte capacity has been reduced to 686 GB due to the default RAID 5 setup of the device.
Under the System Task area you can see several options such as restart, logout, etc. which are pretty clear, but I wasn't sure what the "Identify" button was used for until I checked the documentation. When this button is selected, an LED on the front of the box will blink. So if you're not sure which of your several 150ds you've logged in to, hit the button and it will be obvious. Clever.
Under the Basic menu (Figure 5), options were available for several standard configuration items, such as machine name, administrator password, language, time, etc.
Figure 5: Basics Menu
The 150d supports setting the time via the Network Time Protocol (NTP), but there is no way to specify which NTP server to use. Hopefully Iomega implemented the NTP protocol properly, because as others have found out, hard-coding an NTP server is generally a bad idea and can lead to unexpected problems. An "Alerts" menu lets you set up an email address for problem reporting. Figure 6 shows the "Alerts" configuration.
Figure 6: Alert Setup
I set up the system with my information, and was able to get a test message, but during this review, the only other alerts I received were related to RAID testing I describe later. Note the absence of any way to specify a username/password for the outbound SMTP connection, so if your ISP requires logging in before sending email, you'll have to make other arrangements.
