So on purchasing the NSLU2 (known affectionately as ‘the slug’) the very first thing I did was to move all the data off my 2 500GB external USB disks to make them empty.
The slug supports NTFS file systems (Windows 2000/XP) but only on one of the USB sockets, and its preferable to format the disks using the web interface of the slug – formatting them to the linux EXT3 standard.
So – once I’d formatted it, and got it to boot up, I created a share within the web interface and copied a few files to it to make sure it worked, and all was good. The only challenging bit – if you haven’t got a linksys network you’ll have to change the IP address on the slug – this is defaulted to 192.168.1.77. I’ve got a linksys router so I found it straight away, but I stil changed the IP.
Of course – this means that the slug is simply acting as a file server on the network, enabling my USB drives as network attached storage – but it doesn’t stop there…
The next stop was: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
Given that the slug is essentially a linux server, the source for the operating system has been released by linksys under the GPL, so is available for all. Some enterprising people have taken the said source, and have created various firmwares to flash onto the slug to make it do an awful lot more.
I read a few pages and then decided I’d install the Unslung firmware (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/NewUsersGuide) given it is the version most similar to the Linksys firmware and the most straight forward for beginners. I read through the install guide (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/InstallUnslungFirmware) and then decided to flash my slug using the Linksys web interface, knowing there was no easy way back should it all go wrong…
The install went perfectly fine – within minutes I was ‘unslung’. I then followed the instructions to the letter in order to ‘unsling’ my slug – i.e. get linux running on the hard disk rather than from a ram disk in the slugs limited memory.
Again this wen’t well and within a couple of hours, I had a linux box running on the network with 1TB of space!
A word of warning… you can easily get carried away playing with your slug – there’s just so much fun to be had. Next step I would recommend is installing the mt-daapd (FireFly) iTunes server, as simple as “ipkg install mt-daapd” from root, followed by a tweak to the config file. Now you can leave all your music on the slug’s drive, and stream it to any PC (or SoundBridge etc) on the network.
Enjoy your slug!
…and the next bit of fun you could have would be porting this blog to the Slug – it’s quite capable of driving WordPress if you add the cache plugin, although the admin pages can be a bit slow to load.