{"id":325,"date":"2004-08-29T19:08:59","date_gmt":"2004-08-29T23:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=325"},"modified":"2007-09-05T23:34:26","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T03:34:26","slug":"linksys-nslu2-network-storage-for-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/29\/linksys-nslu2-network-storage-for-the-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage for the people"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives<\/a>. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes<\/a>, but I just want to store stuff from my Linux machines and Catherine’s eMac.<\/p>\n

I bought it, an external USB2.0 3.5″ drive case, and a 160GB Seagate driver yesterday from Canada Computers<\/a> on College St for under C$350, including tax. It took about half an hour to assemble it, install it, and format the drive from the web interface.<\/p>\n

I find it’s easiest to make named users \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and tell the unit to make a subdirectory for that user \u00e2\u20ac\u201d than fiddle about with other methods of making shares. You’ll also need to enable smbfs (File Systems \u00e2\u2020\u2019 Network file Systems \u00e2\u2020\u2019 SMBFS support<\/em> in your kernel config) on your Linux machines.<\/p>\n

I have created three shares: scruss<\/em> (for me), craine<\/em> (for Catherine) and mp3<\/em> (for our shared MP3 collection). I have created relevant directories from \/mnt<\/code>, and chmod<\/code>ed them to the appropriate user. These are the lines I have added to my fstab:<\/p>\n

\r\n\/\/squirrel\/scruss\t\/mnt\/smb_scruss\tsmbfs\tusername=scruss,password=******,rw,users\t0 0\r\n\/\/squirrel\/mp3\t\t\/mnt\/mp3\tsmbfs\tusername=mp3,password=******,rw,users\t0 0<\/pre>\n
I renamed the NSLU2 squirrel<\/strong> to fit in with the Canadian rodent theme I’ve got going with the other machines around here.<\/p>\n
With Catherine’s eMac, I’ve found I have to use the OS X 10.1 \/ .nsmbrc<\/a> method. Once you have the shares defined in the .nsmbrc<\/code> file, you can call them up by doing Connect to Server<\/em> and specifying something like smb:\/\/netbiosname\/share<\/em>, like smb:\/\/squirrel\/craine<\/code>.<\/p>\n
The NSLU2 looks like it will be rock-solid. It has a couple of quirks \u00e2\u20ac\u201d it formats the drive in Linux ext3 format, it will shut down at the slightest hint of a power glitch, and it’s rather slow \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but I can put up with slowness if the data’s secure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes, but I just want to store stuff from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[852,853],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-linksys","tag-nslu2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-5f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}