Well, my Linksys NSLU2 arrived last Friday, and I’ve been playing around with it a little this weekend.

For those who don’t know what this little device is, here’s a bullet list of coolness:

• inexpensive network attached storage (via two USB 2.0 ports)
• support for users and groups (with or without quotas)
• file access via Windows File Sharing (SMB) or FTP
• drive backup (disk-to-disk — after all, you need to backup your backup)
• runs Linux
• features an Intel Xscale processor (ARM architecture) running at 133 MHz
• really, really low power consumption (very green)
• extremely hackable

Here are my first impressions:

Setup

Setup was pretty easy. I have two Samsung SpinPoint 160GB ATA133 disks installed in two “Metal Gear Box” USB 2.0 enclosures. The SpinPoints are quiet, fast, and inexpensive (my most recent one set me back about $80 including shipping). All I had to do was plug in he drives, power them on, and then bring up the little NSLU2.

The device comes up on IP 192.168.1.77, and features the usual Linksys management interface. Formatting the first disk was painless, and setting up a couple of shares also nice and easy. Once I had things configured, I changed the IP to something more suitable for my network and rebooted it. Worked like a charm, and I was reading from and writing to the NSLU2’s attached disk right away.

Performance

Well, you know the saying: “Fast, Cheap, Good; pick two.” The NSLU2 is cheap and good, but it ain’t going to win a speed competition anytime soon.

Disk writes and reads on single files are not bad over SMB; I get about 3.7 MBytes/s, which works out to a paltry 29.6 Mbits/s.

However, things aren’t quite as fast when reading and writing a lot of small files over the network. I don’t have hard evidence, but using psync to do the first backup of my Mac’s HDD over the network (27GB of data) via SMB is been ridiculously slow. In fact, the initial psync process has been running just shy of 24 hours now, and there’s still quite a bit of data to go (it’s working alphabetically, and it’s just now hit /usr/X11R6). I haven’t determined that the slowness is entirely the NSLU2’s fault; it could be psync or the NSLU2’s SMB configuration. I’ll post an update if I learn anything new.

At any rate, the lack of performance is offset by the convenience of having a big chunk of disk space available anywhere in the house without having to sit at my disk and connect a USB or Firewire cable.

Hacking

As mentioned previously, the NSLU2 is very hackable. There are currently two different distributions of the firmware (Unslung and OpenSlug) which provide a way to run all kinds of crap on the little box, some of which have very little to do with serving data or backing up. My favorite hack is using the NSLU2 to run Asterisk, effectively making yourself a little $80 VoIP PBX.

Todo

What I’d like to do with this box, once I’m done actually backing up my Mac’s data:

• install Unslung
• set up an NTP server for my network
• get NFS running
• install rsyncd (it’s bound to be faster than using psync over SMB, right?)
• (optionally) get Subversion working on it