Reviewing the BenHur 2-20, Part 1
by Volker Weber
I have received a BenHur² 20 server friday and have spent a large part of the last 24 hours to install it and migrate a lot of services onto the machine. In a nutshell this is a firewall router with VPN support and an application server for mail, web, fax, DHCP, DNS, database, virus scanner, spam protection and content filter. This is the smallest device in a number of appliances sold by German maker Pyramid and is suited for small businesses with up to 25 users. The package is 1199 Eur with one year of maintenance, 190 Eur per additional year of software service. TrendMicro signatures are 36 per year and user. The box I received was missing a license number so I have not checked the update services yet.
The hardware is a tiny box (9.5"x2.5"x6") with a Celeron 400 MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM. It contains a 20 gig hard disk and runs on Pynix, which is based on Linux and numerous other OSS projects, including Apache, Cyrus, iptables, MySQL, Postfix, Squid and SpamAssassin.
You can download a 5-user version of the operating system free of charge to run on your own hardware. If you look at the specs above this can actually be a 10 year old machine. Take a look at my CPU utilization and you see that the machine is already oversized for me. And this was while importing mail from Domino. Before you give it a try, please consider yourself warned. This is no small feat. You will need serious networking background and quite some time if you want to get a good mileage out of it.
The new BenHur² machine replaces my internet access router and my Domino mail server. The box that used to run the Domino server on Windows NT and Windows 2000 Server will soon be reinitialized. This was long overdue, but I did not want to touch a running setup. I need to move all data from the current Windows shares onto a NAS device before that happens. I believe I could hook up an external disk to the BenHur² but that would require a change in the OS to mount the disk. That I don't want right now. I will rather get a Linksys NSLU2 device and hook up a disk there. This also gives me the opportunity to stream iTunes music directly from the device.
Before getting into any details over the next few days, I can tell you that I am extremely satisfied with the experience so far. The only thing I initially missed was the Spartacus filter that is running on the Domino server, successfully filtering out almost all spam messages. However, I am getting pretty good at tuning the spam filter on BenHur². I believe I will soon be at a comparable protection level.
Now that the old server is hibernating I can hear both my iBook and my iMac for the first time. The BenHur² is emitting zero noise. No fan!
[continued in part 2]
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