A couple of days ago I took delivery of my new Linksys NSLU2 which promised to sort out my storage and backup problems.

After a few hiccups, things are looking good.

The ‘Slug’ was easy enough to set up. Plug in the cables, press on and work your way through the software on a pc (which is only catch btw. You can work through the advanced settings on a mac though). The only trouble I had was that the Slug has a default IP range of 192.168.1 and my router and network is 192.168.0, so that took me a while to fathom out why the new hardware wasn’t being detected. Once it was however, it was plain sailing. I plugged in the new Maxtor 250Gb usb drive, which was duly formatted.

I haven’t messed with many of the advanced settings yet but did the following:

  1. Setup shares for media, me, the wife, and a general share.
  2. Set up permissions groups and then added them to the shares.
  3. Dumped all my mp3’s, fonts, stock photography and video onto the media share. This was a bit of a problem initially because of disallowed characters being in the names of mp3 files. This meant it would get through about 4 gig, then stop. Very annoying.

So still to do is:

  1. Set up retrospect or similar backup solution for the pc laptop and iMac. Unless I can think of a better backup solution which selectively backs files up rather than does whole disk backups.
  2. Maybe work out how to get the Slug running an iTunes and Print server - that would be handy.
  3. Get around to buying a second usb drive to backup the first. Not that i’m paranoid about backups now or anything ;-)
  4. Work on getting Tiger to play ball with my wireless router so my Airport Express can be used.

So, If anyone can recommend some decent, cheaper alternative backup software, that would be good.