The Goldfish Chronicles

I recently obtained a second Linksys NSLU2. I had a couple of hard-drives that I wanted to put into USB Enclosures and put online and I also wanted to be able to play with the NSLU2 Linux project. Last night I did the boring thing and put the new USB drives together and tonight I set the NSLU2 up and ‘unslung’ it; that is I installed the stable nslu2-linux firmware.

There is a bit of magic to figure out as you set it up (cached passwd files, when to set your passwd etc) but it’s all very clearly explained along with many reminders to not attach hard drives while flashing the device. The unslung distro is intended to be a clone of the Linksys firmware, with a few vital improvements. You don’t have to turn it off to (u)mount drives and you can install extra packages on. There’s also something called openslug which is a completely new Linux distro and will have such advantages as being able to hook a USB hub up and have more than the 2-drive limit of the Linksys and Unslung firmware. It’s still in alpha however. Letting the drives power-down is a promised feature too.

Once installed, I telneted in and installed openssh and rsync. There was an alternative to openssh (dropbear I think), but I decided that I’d accept the heavier openssh because I’m comfortable with its configuration and I’ll be moving an ssh key over from a loud noisy 4U server and expecting it to just work. I’m doing this because I’m aiming to have this nslu2 handle backups for my 4 1U servers.

I’m tempted to buy another, they’re addictive at 80 dollars a pop. The only other job the 4U box is doing is being my nagios server, and it would be very cool to have an NSLU2 with a USB thumbdrive acting as a nagios server. This would let me turn the 4U off, which will a) save noise, b) save desk-space and c) save power. The NSLU2 draws 1.5W while a desktop apparantly takes 60W (and the 4U probably takes a fair bit more as it used to have 3 hdd’s and 6 fans or so.

Another feature, which I’ll either install on the original one (which is still on linksys firmware at the moment) or buy yet another nslu2 for, is mt-daapd. An iTunes server so that when we open iTunes our mp3 server will just appear.

Yet another feature is that you can compile a usb 2.0 ethernet driver in and use one of the two usb ports for an usb->ethernet link. This would allow you to use the box as a router, though I keep noticing references to a linksys device that can also be customised a lot and I think that might have been a router.

Java is possible, somebody has instructions for installing JAM but Kaffe apparantly has issues. The biggest limitation here is the 32M (I think) memory that the device has. It seems to fill up pretty quickly with SMB, SSHD, UPNP, thttpd and the various other services that run.

These things are a lot of fun. It amuses me that they are better than the P100, 32M memory, 1Gig hard drive that was my first web/email/bash server. I recommend them to anybody who likes playing with Linux.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2005 at 9:10 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.