New file server
by Volker Weber
Just picked up my new file server (no, not the Treo). It's incredibly tiny. Again: No noise. I will be hooking up two Samsung super silent drives. More later. I've got Gigabytes to move.
Comments
wich size, wich prize ?
Prices but no sizes: http://www.preistrend.de/suchen.php3?keyword=NSLU2
I think I will try the NSLU2 too - or maybe some other device with firefire and hook it up to my mac mini. (80gb is just like nothing)
If a) your Mini is running at all times or b) you only need the files while working on the Mini, by all means get the Firewire drive. It will be much faster.
I got one of these back in December, be sure to check out the great open source work going on with this device...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nslu2-linux/
Amazing what people have been doing with this.
I was dissapointed the software out of the box did not include the FTP server and an easier way to access from the web. Also I was dissapointed it formatted the drive with Linux File System, so I can only plug the device into my linux box and be recognized.
Still it is small, quiet, cheap and does what I wanted.
Try NSLU2-Linux.org for more info and downloads. Got one as a toy quite some time ago. It's silent, it's small, it's powerful.
Carl: why were you dissapointed by a native Linux device creating an ext3 file system on your drive?
I worked over a decade with UNIX systems and, IMHO, ext3 is one of the top 3 file systems out there, almost crash-proof (much better than HFS, btw., which trashes whole directory structures when your disk space runs out and it needs to allocate for growing the extents file - yuck).
The out-of-the-box software sucks, as it does not unleash more than 5% of the potential of this nice platform. I first installed some packages, then a complete gcc toolchain, then compiled python on it. "Pretty" is all I can say about the NSLU2.
/k
I love my NSLU2. If you're at all inclined to hack it, I recommend tinkering with http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
Karsten,
I was dissapointed because it means I cannot unplug the USB drive and just plug it directly into a windows machine when I need to. I don't have any Linux machines apart from one that runs in VMware for educational purposes.
Carl,
I see. It's quite a sad situation about commercial operating systems and their proprietary file systems. From my experience I can assure you, that storage on an ext3 file system happens to be much more robust compared to NTFS(2), VFAT32 or HFS+. I had many severely screwed up NTFS boxes on customer installations after a power outage, systems that lost files or directories (after the CHKDSK run, of course). I had lost directories and files on HFS+ volumes that ran out of space. Bottom line: This never ever happened to any ext3 bases systems at my customers' or my sites. The filesystem tools (fsck) for ext3 are pretty forgiving, too.
Regards,
/k
Is there any neat device like this with Gigabit Ethernet and SATA connectors?
Dear Volker
I had got an NSLU2. I had format a flash memory on a linux system and copied some files ie web pages with extension html, I can see them under: \\fek\disk2
Also I can access the device setting form at 192.168.1.77 or 192.168.1.2
Ok now I had connected NSLU2 with an ethernet cable to a WAG54G Wi-Fi router, option port range 80/80 & 21/21 192.168.1.1 no firewall.
If I run a small web server on a wifi networked pc through the router I can access it from a remote browser.
My question is how I can access the FTP server from the WEB and can I access the flash memory to save power current or it must be a disk. Excuse my ignorence, there is no exhaustive documentation on the linksys CD.
I am an hobbyist and I would like to access certain files ie Downloads from a remote location through my ADSL connection.
Best Paul
This is not a NSLU2 issue. It is all about the WAG54G. If you need to access internal ressources from outside, you need to tell your router where to direct the traffic to. If you map your external port 21 to the internal IP address of the NSLU2, then you can access the device by ftp from the internet.
