As like many other Computer Science persons, i have my own server running at home. I use it primarily as an svn server and to do backup of various things. Being a student, one of the demands I had for server was that it was cheap to run, such that my electrical bill wouldn’t be too insane. After some researching into the matter i discovered the perfect little device: the Linksys NSLU2

The Slug

The NSLU2 is nicknamed Slug. It contains a 266 MHz ARM processor, 32 MB RAM and 8 MB Flash ROM. Being small the only connectors on it are 2 USB ports, an ethernet port and the power. A nice feature of the device is that it is passively cooled, so it is dead quiet . The OS on the slug is a custom made version of Linux.

Modding

Being a Linuc device, there are some nifty people that have managed to replace the firmware on the slug with their own version, making it capable to do a lot more than it was designed to. A good source for information regarding what you can do with a slug is http://www.nslu2-linux.org/.

By changing the firmware it is possible to install the OS on an external disk, making it possible to install a lot more programs on it than can be kept in the 8 MB onboard flash. My first attempt was with Unslung, which is a good starting point, since it only extends the original firmware and still keeps the interface from the original. After a while though, i decided to change it to Debian to get the power of a full linux distro.

My Setup

My Slug runs Debian 5.0, which there is a nice installation guide for here, from a 30 GB external 2.5” harddrive. I have set up ssh with key authentication on it, which is my primary means of interacting with it. I also have Sambato make a little network drive. I have subversion installed for having my own versioning control system. I also have some backup solutions running that stores the backup on Amazon S3, i will describe those setups in other blog posts.