Unslung on my NSLU2

11 May, 2008 

Linksys (Cisco) NSLU2
Motivated by my friend KM here (sorry, Italian link), I decided to buy a Linksys NSLU2, a Micro-NAS based on Linux.
Linksys (owned by Cisco) released since day one the source code of the tuned Linux Kernel, instantly allowing the Open Source community to hack this device in a million of ways.

My requirements are very simple: I need to share something like 6 external HD using either Samba or FTP+HTTP.

I first tried to use the “out-of-the-box” NSLU2 with the latest firmware, but it’s unable to manage more than 2 disks (on an HUB, it just see the first HDD attached).
I then decided to use Debian/NSLU2, a very rich distribution for ARM that is just amazing. The only problem? It seems too much for an hardware like NSLU2, plus, after a normal apt-get dist-upgrade something related with SELinux and vsftpd happened and I didn’t managed to put it all back to work. I should have disabled selinux passing the parameter selinux = 0 to the Kernel at boot time but… there is no “easily modifiable” Bootloader to pass parameters to the kernel at boot time (at least, as far as I know). I suppose that I should modify the kernel, recompile and then re-flash it. Too much for something I want to finish in max 2 days. And the NSLU2 is slow. Very slow. It took something like 12 hours to make the full installation of Debian and flash re-flash the firmware.
Besides, for what I need to do, it’s not worth it to do all this.

So, what I decided was to use Unslung: a modified version of the plain Linksys kernel with some features, a package manager (rich of a lot of very interesting software optimized for the NSLU2) and that works as a Superset of the original features of the Device.
Just plug disks in it and they are available on the Network. I can control the ACL through web interface, but it looks “impossible” to give an arbitrary name to the shared disks. But that’s enough.

I’ll update if I change my mind or if this solutions lasts for longer. ;)

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Tags: IT • personal • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
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1 Comment so far »

  1. Debian on my NSLU2: The Revenge of the Spiral - Detronizator.org wrote on May 17, 2008 @ 21:58

    […] After some playing with Unslung on my Linksys NSLU2, I realize it was a “very limited solution” for our needs. We need to share 4 (sometimes 5) NTFS (or others) volumes, where everyone of them is 500GB: this is too much even for the modified firmware of Unslung, unable to read the full directory trees (and the contained files) of my massive movie’s collection. […]

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