NSLU2 (aka Slug)

[Pirate Bill]

Here's a link if you don't know what it is.

Anybody have one? What are you using it for?

I just got one a few days ago. I was surprised at how small it was when I opened the box. I was expecting something at least twice as big. I hooked up an external USB drive (200GB, nothing terribly big) and ran through the easy and painless install/setup. My networked PCs found it and the shared drive on the network with hardly any effort on my part. It's silent (except for the drive) and uses very little power. A very nice unit.

Now, time to make it even better.

Last night I flashed the firmware and installed Debian. It took a few hours (of sitting around and watching), but the install was successful. With Debian on it there is no longer a web utility to interface with it, but I can SSH into it. My plan is to make it a network share for sharing media (music, photo) or just as a NAS. Also install a LAMP server to tinker around with. Maybe even DNS. This is a great little toy!

[Sub la Goon]

I tried to read.

Now head hurts.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Neat. I was considering something like this before I decided I wanted RAID backup. So since I was building a full server for RAID backup anyway I just multi-tasked it as my NAS/shared drives. I'd probably get slightly better performance out of something like the slug, but ah well.

[Moonliner]

I've seen them but I have never felt the need. I just grab an old PC throw in a few drives a use that.

[Pirate Bill]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Neat. I was considering something like this before I decided I wanted RAID backup.

Oh, I'll be building a RAID server for backup (and more NAS) in the next month or so (not on the slug of course). I suppose that could make the slug a little redundant, but you can never have too many toys, right?

I still haven't quite figured out how I'm going to manage off-site backups though. I don't want to use an internet solution. Too slow to backup and too slow to restore. I am considering a removable drive on the RAID server that will hold all critical backups that I swap out once a month and take off-site for safe keeping. We'll see.

Moonliner - I suppose the appeal is the size and low power requirements. Hackable hardware, linux fun, lots of possibilities, in a teeny tiny living space. I've heard of others using this for pbx and voip as well.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Don't give up on internet for offsite so quickly. An initial backup would be slow, but if you're doing incrementals from then on and schedule them for middle of the night, it's probably just fine unless you're modifying massive amounts of data daily.

[€uroMeinke]

I could use one of those - I wonder if it would cause Lisa's Mac any grief though

[Pirate Bill]

Got Samba up and running. That was quite a chore to configure to get it to work the way I wanted it to. I got a share up and running pretty quick but it wasn't behaving the way I wanted. After some more tweaking and adjusting settings, testing, reconfiguring, and more testing I think I'm understanding Samba a lot better. It sure does require a lot of manual labor though. I tried using SWAT for web based configuration but that just installs a bunch of crap and isn't really all that helpful. I uninstalled it and stuck to manual configuring.

Just installed apache2, php4, and mysql. Haven't done anything with them yet other than set up a couple test pages to verify they work. Only internal network access so far though.

Although some things have been a pain I don't blame the slug. I've played with Linux desktop systems, but I've never set up and administered a server before. And having to do it all over SSH makes it all the more challenging. But that's what I signed up for and it's been a fun learning experience. The slug has actually been a real champ through it all and is taking my abuse quite well.

[lashbear]

doesn't anyone here speak English ??

[Ghoulish Delight]

Are you a vi man? Emacs?