PC Death!
So, I’ve not done too much with my NSLU2 recently as my PC died, so I had to sort out a replacement when I figured it was beyond repair. I’m now back online and will soon be looking into more ways to make my NSLU2 even more useful!
Author: pembo
Attempted hack…
So yesterday, someone tried in vain to hack into this website. I’m not quite sure why they’d bother, but 150 or so tries later they gave up…
It leads me to wonder how sad people must be to spend that amount of time trying to hack a website, for what purpose… to make them feel big, to make them feel good, superior?
Whatever it is, they really should try getting a life…
Slight change
I’ve updated the website slightly to improve the URL structure.
I’ve taken advantage of WordPress’s permalink options to use the post slug in the URL rather than having ugly URL parameters that previously existed.
This makes the site that little bit more friendly and will hopefully make linking to the site that little bit easier. Any old links will still work and don’t have to be changed.
htop – An interactive process viewer on the NSLU2
I recommend htop for any Linksys NSLU2 owner whos ‘unlsung their slug’.
htop is a package that can be installed through ipkg using the following command (as root)
ipkg install htop
Once installed, just type ‘htop’ to run the process viewer.
It’s a curses based process viewer that lets you see, sort and kill processes running on the NSLU2.
Click the image to see it actual sized.
NSLU2 – Backup files
Now that I’ve managed to copy all my important files onto the USB disk plugged into DISK1 of my NSLU2, I wanted to make sure I kept a backup of everything, and decided a good strategy would be to mirror files to the hard disk plugged into DISK2 (via my USB hub) of the NSLU2.
After looking at the linksys web tool and realising the backup stuff doesn’t work properly, I went looking for a smart way to do this, and settled on RSYNC, which can be installed via IPKG.
I use RSYNC to copy changes to a directory from one disk to another, and then have this scheduled to run once a week. I created a number of scripts to backup certain directories, and then schedule these to run on different nights of the week.
The script looks like the following:
#!/bin/sh
before="$(date +%s)"
fromdir="/home/user/"
todir="/share/flash/data/backup/user/"
logfile="/var/log/backup_users.log"
Set_Led beep2
date >$logfile
echo "----------------------------" >>$logfile
/opt/bin/rsync -avrlHpEog $fromdir $todir >>$logfile
echo "----------------------------" >>$logfile
after="$(date +%s)"
elapsed_seconds="$(expr $after - $before)"
date >>$logfile
echo Elapsed time: $elapsed_seconds secs >>$logfile
Set_Led beep1
And then I change the fromdir/todir and logfile depending on what I’m backing up. I’ve also put some time recording into the log file, and some beep commands so you know when its starting and finishing should you be using the NSLU2 at the time.
The only thing left is to schedule this through CRON. I created a symbollic link into /etc/cron.daily then added the entries. The run-parts command for cron doesn’t work on the default version with the NSLU2, hence why you have to add each entry.
My 3 cron entries I have for backups are as follows:
01 0 * * 0 /etc/cron.daily/backupUserDirs.sh
01 0 * * 1 /etc/cron.daily/backupRestorePC.sh
01 0 * * 2 /etc/cron.daily/backupMultimedia.sh
My only criticism – because the NSLU2 is pretty slow, RSYNC can take a while – but then I don’t care as it scheduled to run when I’m not doing anything on my NSLU2. The other tip – copy the files yourself before running a sync – if you make RSYNC do all the work, it could take a while!