Intranet whirlwind
Web servers don’t get much simpler than Compact Devices, Inc.’s Twister. In a box no bigger than a pair of modems comes all the software you need to set up and customize a department Web server. Twister’s virtues are its simple installation and maintenance. Its main drawback is its inability to do more than file serving.
Twister comprises a 1G-byte SCSI hard drive and utilities to quickly turn it into a Web server.
Hardware setup is simple. Plug in a power cord, connect the unit to a 10Base-T cable and you’re done.
Software installation isn’t much more complex. Compact Devices includes a diskette with a BOOTP utility called Instant IP that you can install on any Windows 95 or NT workstation.
With it, you specify the media access control address of the Twister server and the IP address you want to assign it, turn on the machine and watch a status field as the server configures itself. You can also specify an IP address via Reverse Address Resolution Protocol or on a command line via serial connection.
You now have a working, albeit not yet terribly useful, intranet server. When you first access it, you see a home page and a setup wizard for configuring the box.
Here you specify a supervisor password and choose a basic security model. You can let anyone read and write Twister directories, or you can reserve write privileges to the supervisor.
This doesn’t prevent you from setting up individual accounts whose users can write to their own directories. When you do so, still within the setup wizard, Twister automatically creates a subdirectory for each user.
At the end of the setup process, you can customize Twister’s default home page to give it many different looks.
If you’re an experienced administrator who disdains wizards, you can access a main configuration page that lets you zoom to the task you want to perform.
In addition to any files you create, Twister comes with a number of graphic elements and sample sites you can use as templates for creating your own pages.
With the hardware, Compact Devices packages Claris Corp. Home Page, a basic page authoring tool, provides a hyperlink to and license key for Net-It Software Corp.’s Net-It Now document publishing tool.
If you need more storage, you can expand Twister by connecting another SCSI device to the provided Centronics SCSI connector.
You can add only one additional read/write drive; other storage must be read-only.
Any SCSI drive you add must be formatted with a Twister configuration utility before use, so you can’t simply add preconstructed content. You can also add as many as five CD-ROM drives to the SCSI bus.
The information can then be accessed from a browser or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) by specifying a device name.
Twister does a good job of serving up intranet files via HTTP, FTP and Trivial FTP, but because it uses a proprietary Web server/operating system stored in flash memory, you can’t add third-party executables. That means no proxy server or client/server audio or video software.
Still, at $1,095, Twister is an affordable, speedy way to quickly get a department or workgroup sharing files.
Articles | Administrator | 
Monday, June 30, 1997 12:00 pm
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