Linksys NSLU2

Last week I got the Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives (nslu2 for short) that I had ordered. Though I didn’t get much further than unpacking it.

Monday evening I spent trying to reflash the unit with the Unslug firmware. Which is a custom firmware built on top of the GPL linksys firmware shipping with the device. By using a custom fireware the possible usages of the device are endless. It basically turns the thing into a small linux machine. You can install openssh, apache, mysql, etc etc. The only limitations are the limited processor power and small amount of available memory.

Unfortunately the flashing didn’t go that well, for some reason it didn’t like Safari on my iBook. Yesterday when I tried using Internet Exploder on my Windows machine it succeeded. So now I’m all set to configure an almost noiseless file server that use almost no power at all. That’s going to be a perfect ftp server. And if the 250 GB USB hard drive I attached is not enough I can easily add another drive. So space shouldn’t be a problem :)