SmallNetBuilder

Feature Tour

Once the initial setup is completed under the Windows installation utility, you can move on to the web-based interface for additional configuration and maintenance. Figure 5 shows the web interface once I had logged in as an administrator.

Figure 5: Web Interface

In general, I found the interface used in the box to be attractive with some "Web 2.0" AJAX functionality where changes can be made without a complete page reload. Although the Interface looked nice, seeing titles such as "Manager Establishment Information Changing", shows that Mvix could use some help in their translation department (Mvix is an Korean company).

The picture in the upper left of this screen (no that's not me!) was the default photo but each user can change it to whatever they want. After a while I found this default image a bit creepy so I looked closer and found that the name of the file used was "con_l_man.jpg", a curious choice for the default administrator image!

I won't have space here to go into detail on all of the options from this menu, but I'll touch on some of the more interesting ones. First, the web interface is designed to support both normal and administrative users, which is a little bit unusual. Typically the interfaces on NASes are just used for configuration purposes, but this box is a bit different. Mvix seems to be targeting the MvixBOX toward those who want to have a Portal with a community of users. There are options for each user to create and customize their own Blog, for example. Users can also send notes to each other (Figure 6), and they can communicate through a built-in message board.

Figure 6: Note Capabilities

When sending notes, users can even pass references to files for sharing. And speaking of sharing, the box also has Torrent and RSS capabilities, but when I tried out this feature (Figure 7), I ran into trouble.

Figure 7: Torrent and RSS

Every time I would try to start up a Torrent, the web interface would seem to lock up. I could still access shares on the box, but the web interface would be unresponsive so I had no choice but to reboot.

When a normal user is logged in, the administrative options such as user and group management (Figure 8) are grayed out.

Figure 8: Group Assignment

As seen in the lower-left corner of the screen back in Figure 5, both normal and administrative users get Windows and MacOS buttons that will download little utilities for connecting to the Box. Figure 9 shows the MacOS version of the utility.

Figure 9: Webdisk Connector

From this menu, you can see that choices are available for both SMB and WebDAV connections, but not AFP or NFS, which the MvixBOX also supports. This utility worked fine for me, but it wasn't clear why a separate utility was needed, since both of these protocols, plus NFS and AFP, are supported natively in OS X's "Finder".

Digging into the administrative menus, you'll find options for setting up users, groups, network parameters, quotas, time, etc. One unusual feature I noticed as I went thorough the menus was user specification. Any time a user needed to be specified, there was a "search" option to help find the user name or ID. This implied that the designers were expecting the administrator of the box to be managing many users, which once again shows the community-of-users focus of the product. There were also options for generating temporary "guest" users, whose accounts would be time-limited.

There was also an option for setting up email parameters so the Box could send out alerts and status messages (Figure 10), but it wasn't able to use my settings.

Figure 10: Email Setup

You can see in this menu, that there are no options for non-authenticated email servers, or for using alternate ports, or SSL-enabled servers, etc. I find this is common for these products. They just don't have enough flexibility when setting up SMTP, with the result being that they are unable to send out email.

The MvixBOX does have a lot of flexibility, however, when setting up network services. Support is present for a number of different protocols such as SMB, NFS, AFP, WebDAV, FTP, print serving and even iTunes serving. And for those wanting a command line, I was happy to see that the MvixBOX even has the ability to turn on SSH.

For Windows users, there's an "Explorer" feature (requiring an Active X plug-in) that lets you treat the Box more like a local resource from your browser (Figure 11).

Figure 11: WebDisk Explorer

This seemed a bit duplicative for local users, but it might help remote users who can't directly mount shares on the Box. There is also a Windows-only backup software capability for backing up your data to the MvixBOX, but I found no option for backing up the disks on the MvixBOX itself.