Now Witness the Power of This Fully Armed and Operational Debian NSLU2

This post is trumpeting the successful installation of Debian onto a Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link.

The unit is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server which allows upto two USB hard drive or flash drive to be network accessible from anywhere. There are lots of different firmware replacements available developed by the open source community and these allow you to use the NSLU2 as a dedicated Linux box.

The NSLU2's specs are:

• 266Mhz ARM Intel XScale CPU
• 32MB SDRAM
• 8MB Flash
• 10/100 RJ-45 Ethernet port
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• 5V DC power consumption (solar power?)

I used a 4GB USB flash drive as the boot disk which I needed to manually partition as the instructions say you need at least 256MB for swap partition, but the Guided Partitioning process made approximately 93MB for swap. Below is a record of my settings:

My partitions were configured as:
3.7GB – Primary partition, used for ext3, bootable, mounted as /
380MB – Logical partition, used for swap (lots more than the recommended 256MB)

Changing the hostname from the serial number:

    echo slug > /etc/hostname

Modified /etc/network/interfaces to end with:

    # The primary network interface
    allow-hotplug eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp
        hostname slug

Links

• NSLU2 Linux: the homestead of all Linux things for the NSLU2
• Debian Installer Firmware: to bootstrap the installation
• Installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2
• WinSCP and PuTTY: The essential SSH tools for Windows

That’s no moon, it’s a server!