Debian on my NSLU2: The Revenge of the Swirl

Sat, 17 May 2008 21:57:58 +0000

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.

[![](http://lh6.ggpht.com/detronizator/SC9F6fE2BaE/AAAAAAAAA8I/oz-Ujfnmj9g/s160-c/TheDebianNSLU2SReign.jpg)](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign)

[The Debian/NSLU2's Reign](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign)

So, I came back to the Debian/NSLU2 solution. This time, with all the intention to make it work. It’s quite pointless to report here all the things I did to make it work in the way I want/need. I’ll just write down the most important bits:

Unslung on my NSLU2

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:32:22 +0000

Motivated by my friend KM here (sorry, Italian link), I decided to buy a Linksys NSLU2, a Micro-[en:NAS] based on [en: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 [en: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 [en: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” [en: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.

Selinux on Zio Ivan

Debian on my NSLU2: The Revenge of the Swirl

Unslung on my NSLU2