p.l.o.a. problems

Andrew, that p.l.o.a. issue is already known (thanks wildfire) and scheduled to be fixed (and is my fault that it hasn't yet been fixed). Hopefully over the Christmas break this and atom support can get added when I get a round tuit.

tech/projects | 23 Dec 2005 | #

Linksys NSLU2

So my latest toy is a Linksys NSLU2 "slug" home NAS unit. Look at that great size - just al little bigger than a Treo650. It arrived yesterday from OzTechnologies and everyting just worked.

Well, almost.

The USB hard drive I plugged it into wasn't jumpered right - which wasn't my fault as the drive was assembled into the USB case by the company I bought it from - and consequently the slug failed to properly format the drive as ext2. This meant plugging it into shadowfax (my laptop), deleting all partitions, and starting over after correcting the invalid jumpering on the drive. The slug should have given me some diagnostic rather than just failing.

Setup of the device is very easy, with a web browser interface to control all settings. Giving the device a static IP address, a name that fits in with the naming scheme of my home network, creating a couple of users and shares are all that's needed to be up and going. Oh yeah, make sure you change the default root password too - the interface doesn't compel you to do so :-(

Then it was a simple as creating a desktop shortcut by using my Ubuntu GNOME desktop to the share, saving the passwords into my keyring, giving me an easy way to connect to the device in the future.

So opening the share in a nautilus window is the next step, followed by opening up another window for ~/photos/. Select All, Copy, change window, paste. 90 minutes later all 20Gb of my photos are now on a network share instead of my laptop.

Yay!

Where to from here? Well, the nslu2-linux project is probably next on the agenda.

tech/gadgets | 23 Dec 2005 | #