19 May
2006
19 May
'06
4:53 p.m.
In message <200605191946.k4JJkHhC031503 at onyx.spiritone.com>
"Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
Oh, now that is just plain cool! I don't think
I've ever looked at any of
this type device.
<http://www.nslu2-linux.org> has a load of info on what you can do with it.
Even some hardware hacks (see below).
I'm running OpenDebianSlug on mine, with a patched 2.6.16 kernel (2.6.12.2 is
horrendously unstable). If you want the kernel modules and the flashbios
image, I'll see about putting them online somewhere.
I can't find any hard data, I assume it just talks
Samba out of the box?
Yep. The web-admin interface is a bit quirky though; I prefer setting stuff
up by editing the config files manually :)
Putting Debian on there offers up some real
posibilites (NFS, Samba,
Appletalk, and DECnet). Though that limited memory is a real bummer.
It's not a real big deal if you hook up a USB hard drive. Mine had about 10MB
free until I installed the mailserver software (I'm using UW-IMAPD, IPOP3D
and Postfix). It's also running the Cherokee webserver software, NFS,
Subversion, MySQL, Samba's Winbind, SMBd and NMBd servers, some stuff to
catch SNMP traps from the WiFi AP, fetchmail, CUPS and OpenSSH. Currently
showing 8MB free RAM, and about 30MB swap in use. I've got 128MB swap
allocated on the HDD, and you get about 30MB out of the 32MB RAM after the
initrd's taken its cut.
DebianSlug is supposedly the best version of Debian to use on an NSLU2,
primarily because it uses packages from the official Debian ARMLE
(little-endian ARM) port. OpenDebianSlug uses the OpenSlug big-endian kernel
and the unofficial big-endian ARM port of Debian. I'm running OpenDebianSlug,
no problems since the kernel swap, but the package updates sometimes lag a
bit.
They're also pretty hackable - you can replace the RAMs with larger chips and
(in theory at least) go as far as 128 or 256MB. Not sure why you'd want to,
but I'd like to give it a try at some point. Power consumption is only 5W or
so - they're bundled with a 2A PSU, but 1A of that is 'reserved' for the USB
ports. My USB hard drive (a firmware-patched IBM 75GXP in a Vantec Nexstar2
casing) wolfs about 30W...
--
Phil. | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G VF+UniPod
philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 1G+180G
http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G