SmallNetBuilder

Feature Tour

Figure 4 shows the main web-based configuration screen that I found to be fairly attractive, responsive and easy to use although a few of the menus were a bit misdrawn using Safari under OSX. Note that the web-configuration menu is only accessible through HTTP, not the more secure HTTPS.

Figure 4: TS-S402 Main Menu

From these menus, basic network configuration such as IP address, netmask, DNS info can be set, the administrator's password changed, the system can be rebooted, etc. While setting up the network, I noted that the S402 does not support jumbo Ethernet frames. Figure 5 shows one of the basic setup menus where a number of configuration items are available.

Figure 5: TS-S402 Basic Setup

From this menu, you can see where the Windows workgroup name can be specified, the web port can be changed, a NTP server can be specified, etc.

Along with the basic setup, a number of more interesting features can be turned on and off. Figure 6 shows the "Server Preference" where these services can be activated.

Figure 1: TS-S402 Server Preference

This mens shows standard support for Windows file sharing using Samba, FTP server support and NFS support. It's good to see support for NFS which is a file-service protocol natively used under Unix-type machines such as Linux and OSX. Unfortunately, the use of NFS requires the client to know the full path of the remote share on the server side and Trendnet does not document this.

But recently, I learned a new method of getting this path. The showmount -e <ip-address> command issued from a Unix command line will let you query remote servers to find out the full path of shares. Once I used this, I was able to NFS mount shares on the S402.

Media Services

The other services listed in this menu are used for serving multimedia to your network. If you have a compatible client device, a UPnP AV server can stream music, videos and pictures on your network. Figure 7 shows the setup menu for the UPnP AV server.

Figure 7: TS-S402 UPnP Setup

My tests of this server showed it to work, but its functionality was a bit limited. All of my multimedia was presented in a single list instead of being segregated by music, pictures and video. And, as is the case with all of this type of usage, the supported multimedia formats depends on what type of UPnP client you have on your network.

The other server supported is an "iTunes Server". So if you run iTunes on your computer, you can have the S402 serve up music for you. Figure 8 shows a screen-grab of a portion of my iTunes application where the S402 server is shown.

Figure 8: TS-S402 iTunes integration

My tests showed this worked fine with standard mp3s and with DRM-restricted music purchased through the iTunes music store. As you can see in this figure, album-art was also supported.

Another interesting feature of the S402 is BitTorrent support. You can upload a BitTorrent file and have the S402 handle the download for you. Figure 9 shows a BitTorrent download status menu.

Figure 9: TS-S402 Bittorrent Status

My tests of this capability showed that it worked fine, although the status menu was a bit sparse, lacking fields like number of seeds, number of peers, estimated time to completion, etc. I find that NAS devices and bittorrent clients are a good fit, especially for jobs that require multiple days to finish. Fire up a torrent, walk away and let it do its thing in the background.

Another interesting menu found under the configuration section was "Remote Package" which appears to be a method to add software to the box, although I found no documentation on the feature or any packages on the Trendnet web site.