Armorlink Post Genie Web Mail Server Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

You remember that Metallic mint green convertible in My Cousin Vinny? Well Metallic Mint Green is back! This time in Web Mail Server form! Today we examine the Post Genie WMS-2208R from ICP Electronics, distributed by Armorlink in North America. ICP Electronics probably will not ring too many bells but they do produce a variety of other computer components. Most of these are for more specialized applications like the Post Genie including NAS products and server chassis'. ICP makes its headquarters in Taipei and was established in 1997. After starting off as a relatively modest 57 person operation, they currently employ 600 workers and have revenues in excess of $100 Million dollars annually.

The Post Genie

The Post Genie is a combination Mail/DHCP/Print server and router all built into a single unit. The mail component of the server extends beyond server capability but also provides a webmail interface that could eliminates the need for email clients. A solid metal casing houses the Post Genie; it is aimed at the SOHO market and is few steps up from a run of the mill plastic router found at the local computer superstore. The front of the Post Genie is uncluttered and consists of a LCD Panel, a scroll wheel and a few lights indicating active LAN connections. On the back side, there are 8 LAN ports, a WAN port, a printer port (both parallel and USB), 2 openings for fans, a power connector, power and reset switches. Hooking up the Post Genie was a quick job, after plugging in the AC and a lan cable it was up and running. The unit takes about 2 minutes to boot up and this is indicated on the front LCD. The same beep when a regular computer boots up can be heard when the Post Genie is initially fired up. The product design is a bit strange in terms of the shape. It is about the same height as a 2U rackmount unit while being about half the width and about a 1/3 of the depth so putting this unit into a colocation facility may not be possible and is probably not the market that ICP and Armorlink are aiming at.

The mail server itself is pretty extensible. Our evaluation unit came with a 40 Gigabyte harddrive but the Post Genie can take up to 2 200 GB hard drives. There are several disk configurations available including RAID 1, RAID 0 and just a normal volume. Unless the data is of absolutely no importance, it would be recommended that RAID 0 mode be avoided as the probability of losing data due to hard disk error is squared as compared to a normal disk volume.

The Post Genie runs of a custom Linux kernel based off of 2.4.18. Unfortunately requests for the source code were not met. Hopefully ICP / Armorlink realizes that if they distribute binaries with modified GPLed code they are obligated to release it when someone asks for the source. Assuming that the rest of the system is built with other open source components, it can be surmised that the HTTP frontend is based off Apache. Function calls are made through a CGI-BIN so it is likely that Perl drives the interaction between the form interaction and the Linux internals. The SMTP engine is based off of qmail, the same thing that powers many sites including Yahoo! mail, Network Solutions, and Verio. SSH/Telnet access to the Post Genie are disabled by default. It would have been preferable for ICP to have left an option in so that users could login into the server and run things through command-line. This could have potentially eased migration in from existing infrastructure as well as possibly enabling the machine to function as a file server or the like.