In message <200605191755.k4JHtLYJ028662 at onyx.spiritone.com>
"Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
NSLU2? What on earth is that?
www.linksys.com -> search for NSLU2.
Basically it's an ARM-powered mini server that runs Linux. They're designed
to connect a USB hard drive or pendrive to a LAN (kind of a poor man's NAS),
but there's been a lot of hacking done on them. I've got mine running Debian,
with a custom kernel and the kernel-mode Speedtouch ADSL driver. At the
moment it's doing the DSL routing, email downloading, spam filtering, print
serving, some basic network monitoring (MRTG) and hosting my SVN repository.
I've also been using it to tunnel through annoying firewalls... It's kinda
nice to have files downloading when the connection is usually idle and have
everything ready to go by the time I get home.
CPU is an Intel IXP440 Xscale running at 133MHz, but it can be overclocked
(well, actually de-underclocked) to run at 266MHz. It's only got 32MB of RAM,
but that's plenty for what I use it for. Main reason I bought it was because
it's totally fanless - the only noise is from the HDD. Certainly beats having
a noisy PC running 24/7. I was kinda getting sick of swapping out case fans
and power supplies...
BTW, I don't have any issues with the speed of
Perl or Ruby on my VMS
server, just Python. The actual execution of Python on VMS seems to be
fairly fast, at least on my box, the problem is the overhead with starting
it.
That seems to be the problem on the NSLU as well. Once Perl is up and
running, it's not too bad. It's the startup time (and RAM usage) that causes
the problems (and SpamAssassin's sheer complexity).
--
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