On Jul 23, 2006, at 2:00 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
How goes the battle with the Linksys NSLU2? It would be nice to get an update.I was especially surprised at your comment about Debian being unhappy with such a small memory space. It does have 32 megabytes, after all.
Well, I'm not sure exactly _what_ the problem was with Debian Etch, but _anything_ I tried to run would segfault, and the boot image refused to start up any network services, which kind of made it useless. Ended up having to reflash to the installer image, mount the disks and chroot to try to fix it. apt-get kept segfaulting, too, though, so I gave up and moved on.
So, I've tried: Stock firmware (Linksys) Unslung firmware (Linksys + extra goodies) Debian Etch (a full-on ARMv5 little-endian port with custom kernel)Finally, I settled on OpenSlug, which is based on the OpenEmbedded project. It's Yet Another Embedded Linux distro, uses ipkg, and has a fairly nice package repository.
One of the really nice things about the NSLU2 (henceforth known as the slug) is that the Redboot firmware, when you power it up with the reset button tricks, will drop it into an upgrade mode. Using the "upslug2" package, you can remotely load a new firmware image over the network. This is great, because it even lets you recover from a bad flash.
Installation was, all things considered, rather simple. Flash the OpenSlug firmware on, boot it with no disks attached, and log in as root over ssh. Run a couple commands to configure it, attach the first hard drive, partition, and reboot. Log in again, run another command to dump the root FS from flash to the HD and reboot again.
Log in yet again to verify it's running off the HD, and then start installing things with ipkg. It's kinda like apt, but more blunt.
I've got it running BIND for household DNS, NFS and Samba and quite happily playing nicely with everything else. The Linux box loves NFS (hooray autofs) and I've got the two Macs and the Windows box using SMB. I wanted to install ISC DHCPd, but there's no package available for it and I haven't yet figured out what all else I'd need to install to compile it from sources. As a compromise, I've converted everything to static IPs and set my router to offer DHCP for when friends come over.
Tried the Macs with NFS (using NFS Manager, a shareware app, to set up the mount points), and was disappointed by the abysmal performance. I blame Apple.
My current battle is trying to get mt-daapd to work with iTunes (presents the slug as an iTunes shared library). I think there's a version mismatch between the available mt-daapd for the slug and iTunes 6, 'cause iTunes refuses to connect to the slug.
I could, in theory, install openldap and kerberos, but I see no need for that complexity at home.
One really nice bit of information is that the slug, running OpenSlug, simply uses ext3. If I need to, I can plug both drives into my x86 Linux box and mount the filesystems and do whatever I need to. There seem to be no endian-ness issues (OpenSlug is ARMv5 big-endian) that I've been able to discover, so I'm assuming that the ext2/3 people took care of it all in their code.
In terms of performance, I get about 3-4MB/s over Samba connections, and a little more over NFS from the Linux box. Right in line with the info at
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Info/Performance actually. In terms of raw performance over the USB link: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/disk1/testfile bs=1M count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 11.779 seconds, 8.9 MB/s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/disk2/testfile bs=1M count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 14.6776 seconds, 7.1 MB/s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/export/disk1/testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 7.85255 seconds, 13.4 MB/s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/export/disk2/testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 7.80498 seconds, 13.4 MB/s/export/disk1 is on my first HD, a WD 120GB USB2/FireWire external drive. Might be 7200rpm, I think.
/export/disk2 is my second HD, a Maxtor 250GB drive in a MacAlly USB2/ FireWire enclosure which uses, amusingly, the exact same bridgeboard as the WD enclosure. I think it's only 5400rpm.
I'm suspect of the read speeds, but the write speeds seem about on par for USB, given that it's a $55 device driving them.
Any other questions? :) Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
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