The Goldfish Chronicles

Earlier in the week, I made an attempt to get an NSLU2 (which I’ve now learned to call a Slug) running on a 64M flash stick. It’s not the intended way, and I got surprisingly far before learning the reasons why it’s not as simple as all that. An unslung slug in fact, but without the ability aka space to install new packages.

I knew it’d be tricky getting it to work on flash as you’re not intended to plug flash sticks into the USB1 slot, just the USB2 slot; but turns out that 64M is too small for the default partitioning that the new firmware OS does. It uses about 150M by default for swap, config etc.

So fresh with the knowledge of what I’d done wrong, I attempted to rollback to the Linksys firmware and start again. Apparantly realising that you’ve got a USB stick still in there when you start the update and pulling it out is a bad idea. To be fair, everything you read warns you not to do this, I was just being an idiot. Voila, one brick (the less affectionate name for a dead slug).

However, provided the bootstrap/bios (known as RedBoot) is still there, you can get it working via one of 3 ways. I tried all 3 without luck before getting encouragement to try the first again and finding it worked from a different machine.

“There and back again, a slug story”

I immediately installed the slug again with the unslung software, against a hard drive. Then I pondered how to get Nagios on there. Not easy it seems, there’s not a package for gcc, so I might have to learn about cross-compiling. Openslug, the alpha-new-OS, does have a gcc available, so possibly I could move to that and do the compiling on the slug. Nagios also needs Perl, but it looks like that is available. The plan is to figure out how much space Nagios needs, then get something of suitable size.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.