SmallNetBuilder

Feature Tour

The web-based administrative interface is quite straightforward to use.  On the main menu page shown in Figure 4, you can select each sub-menu by clicking on the icons displayed across the top of the screen, or you can click on a link contained in a short description of each sub menu.

Figure 4: Main Menu

Most of the menu selections are fairly self-explanatory, so I'll comment only briefly on each one:

Setup – Walks you through the same three step setup wizard that you completed when you first logged into the system.

Account Management – Create, delete and edit users.  You can also set folder privileges for individual users.  The Central Axis does not support user groups.

Figure 5: User Access Privileges

Shared Folder Management – Create, delete suspend or reactivate folders. Similar to the account folder control above, this lets you control access for each shared folder.   Another function in this sub-menu lets you enable/disable the media server and specify where to look for multimedia content and iTunes music.

Figure 6: Share Access Privileges

Shared Folder Backup – If you have attached a USB hard drive to the Central Axis, you can back up shared folders to the external device.  For our tests, we attached a Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini to the USB port on the Central Axis.  The status page showed that it was formatted for NTFS. 

When we tried to create a backup set to backup one of the shares, an alert notified us that NTFS format was incompatible. The Central Axis prompted us to reformat the drive.  A Maxtor tech support person advised that the reformat would be FAT32.  A couple of things to note:

• The NTFS external drive mounted as a read-only public access device.
• The Maxtor Central Axis doesn't support USB flash drives -  only external drives.  (though the flash keys may work…)

We connected another external USB drive that was formatted EXT3, and were able to backup a share to the external drive.  The share backed up into a single tar.gz compressed file.

Advanced Features – Includes configuration of remote access, network settings, USB external device settings, a pointer back to the basic setup menu, and various system maintenance functions such as power settings and firmware upgrades (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Advanced Features

System Status – This sub-menu provides summary information about accounts, share status, and web access status.  Also available on this tab is the previously mentioned system log that essentially logs very little.