Excito B3 Mini ARM Powered Server
The operating system was also upgraded along the way from running Debian Etch on the previous BUBBA to now running Debian Squeeze on the B3. The Excito B3 device is still a very new product and the Linux kernel running on this Debian Squeeze installation is the Linux 2.6.35.4 kernel for the armv5tel architecture. The CPU information exposed under Linux identifies the hardware as a BUBBA3 Kirkwood based mini-server and a Feroceon 88FR131 CPU. The 1TB drive is a Western Digital WDC WD10EARS-00Y that is formatted using an EXT3 file-system -- it is a bit surprising that Excito did not choose EXT4.
The Excito B3 is larger than the PogoPlug and TonidoPlug (though neither of these devices include an actual HDD/SSD), but still it is relatively modest and around the same size or a bit larger than most 3.5-inch hard drive enclosures. The device itself is colored black while Excito's logo is screen-printed on the top and on the face of the home server is "B3" stamped into the aluminum along with one LED indicator. The overall build quality for the Excito B3 is very rugged and we have not a single concern about the quality of the hardware. At the rear of the B3 are two antenna connectors for the 802.11g/n WiFi, one Gigabit WAN port, one Gigabit LAN port, two USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, one 12V/3A DC power connector, a Kensington lock slot, and the power button. We view a Kensington lock slot as a must these days on such enclosures/servers for data storage so that is good to see. To access the innards of this device there are two mini hex screws in opposing corners. The B3 is in fact made in Sweden, yeah!
Setting up the Excito B3 is extremely easy. Simply connect the B3 to the external power supply, connect any USB/eSATA devices such as external storage or printers (or in reality anything else as this is a fully capable Linux server), connect the WAN port if this device will be used as a router, and then hook the LAN port into a switch/router/computer depending upon your intended network configuration. Included with the Excito B3 is a small getting started guide that just goes over these easy setup steps (and also printed in the getting started guide is the GNU GPLv2 license printed in full), a short Ethernet cable, and the power adapter. Included with our review sample was a power cable with the standard European plug, but fortunately the external power supply supports 100~240V 50~60Hz and we have plenty of plug adapters laying around the Phoronix office.
Once everything is plugged in and the device is powered up, the B3 can be accessed from the web-browser and configured in a similar and easy-to-use manner like the PogoPlug, TonidoPlug, and similar home servers. Excito's web interface is incredibly slick and easy-to-use. In fact, it is our new favorite interface among the different products. Besides looking visually appealing, the Excito web interface allows you to easily create/manage users, manage files, upgrade the software stack, manage backups, enable/disable a variety of services, configure the network WAN/LAN/Wireless/Firewall capabilities, create a disk RAID array, setup an LVM, and manage Bit Torrent upload/download throttling. Among the services that can be toggled from the web interface are FTP, anonymous FTP, AFP, Windows file share / Samba, UPNP streaming, DAAP streaming, Squeezebox Server, e-mail send and receive, IMAP, email retrieval, printing, and uploads/downloads.
To much satisfaction, Excito does not lock-down the device but does allow you to SSH into the device into any created users (there's an option from the web interface whether to allow SSH into a particular account) and once logged in you can also root the device (for those that may have the Excito B3 but can't find the root password, the default root password is "excito"). Not only does Excito allow root access, but they actually the Debian main package repository for Squeeze in APT's sources.list. Excito also adds in their own repository for their own packages from the Elvin repository of http://b3.update.excito.org/ as they use APT for handling the B3's upgrades. With all of this said, soon as we SSH'ed into the B3 and dropped down to root, we had no problems running commands like apt-get install build-essential and we were easily on our way to configuring the device.
Excito Sweden sent the B3 out to us in September and since then we have had the pleasure of using this device. It's really quite a great compact, low-power (our monitoring tests do confirm that the B3 is going through 10W or less at most times) server that can be easy to manage and use from the excellent web interface and from also connecting via SSH to be exposed to the full Debian Squeeze operating system. We have tested the Excito B3 over a few weeks in different configurations from being a wired/wireless router to a web server to SSH-ing to the ARM-based server for running some Phoronix Test Suite tests on this architecture. It all works well.
The B3 wired model with a 500GB hard drive is currently selling for €279 (just under $400 USD) or €359 (approximately $500 USD) for the model with 802.11g/n WiFi support. Either model can also be upgraded to a 1TB/2TB HDD or a 40GB SSD. The Excito B3 is more expensive than the PogoPlug/TonidoPlug and similar NAS devices, but it includes much more with the two USB 2.0 ports, eSATA connectivity, an integrated hard drive, a more polished web-interface, a more complete Debian Linux installation, WiFi connectivity (optional), and the dual Gigabit Ethernet ports so it can fully function as a complete server and router for the home or small office. Really one of the only issues we have is that the Excito B3 is currently only available through the Exico web-site in Sweden and cannot be found (at least not yet) from US retailers like Amazon and NewEgg. The Excito B3 is a great device and we would highly recommend this Scandinavian designed and manufactured Linux-based compact home server appliance if you are interested in any of its mentioned functionality.
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