Ooh, a post not about anti-terror laws - shock horror. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I mused on NAS drives for the home. Several people in the comments section recommended hooking up an ordinary USB hard drive with a Linksys NSLU2 - an option I had considered but wasn’t keen for the additional expense and un-neatness of having two separate bits of kit.

Anyway, I then found a pretty decently priced USB HD - a 250GB Buffalo Drivestation, from Amazon for £85, and that brought the cost per gig down to a level in my current price range. So I bought the two items, and set them up. And it’s working pretty fine, although my wireless connection does occasionally blip out, but then I am running my MP3 folder as a mapped hard drive, rather than streaming it like I should do. Also, the Buffalo is needlessly ugly, but I really don’t mind that too much.

So, I’m happy with it. But, there’s a few things worth knowing, if you plan to do the same:

• The packaging and manual for the NSLU2 say you have to format the drive using EXT3, which means you can’t then re-plug it back into a Windows PC via USB directly. This would be a pain, especially as it means you can’t load up the drive using the USB connection (which is faster than doing so via Ethernet), then plug it back into the network via the NSLU2. But, help is at hand - Linksys have offered a firmware upgrade that allows it to handle NTFS as well as EXT3. Hurrah.
• The NSLU2’s default IP address is 192.168.1.77. My router (a Netgear) operates in the 192.168.0.* IP range by default, which means it couldn’t find the NSLU2. It took me nearly an hour to work this out, stupidly, a simple change in the settings panel sorts it out fine.
• If you want to use Windows network neighborhood with the NSLU2, then remember to give it the correct workgroup in (”Administration” -> “System” in the NSLU2’s interface), else it won’t show up properly when connected.

And that’s it. It’s not absolutely perfect running the MP3 storage drive using Windows’ own networking protocols, but good enough for the moment, When I have a little more time I will probably re-flash it with some of the NSLU2-Linux project’s software so I can do cool stuff like proper MP3 streaming and things like that. My thanks to everyone whose comments helped me in choosing.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 16:24:23 and is filed under General.