The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

May 13th, 2005

Getting geekier by the minute

No kid­ding, soon I’m going to have my own shed full of gad­gets, sit­ting in amongst them gig­gling like a schoolgirl. 

Or maybe not. 

What I have done though is sor­ted out my backup situ­ation fol­low­ing my external hard drive fail­ure after installing Tiger. 

After much research I’ve opted for buy­ing a Link­sys NSLU2 (or ‘Slug’ as it’s also known) and a Lacie 250gb triple inter­face drive for my backup needs. This saves me a bit of cash overe most of the other all-in-one con­sumer NAS solutions.

The NSLU2 is actu­ally turn­ing out to be an inter­est­ing bit of kit.

It’s basic­ally a inter­face between external hard drives or flash drives (USB2 x 2 ports) and an exist­ing eth­er­net net­work (eth­er­net port x 1). The cool thing is it runs a stripped down ver­sion of Linux and has a rather large devel­op­ment com­munity ded­ic­ated to hack­ing the crap out of it.

Some inter­est­ing things you can do with this seem­ingly remark­able bit of hardware:

All of this does require a bit of, or a lot of, unix famili­ar­ity (which I am not, at all) so we’ll see how thing pro­gess once I get it set up next week.

Now all I have to do is wait for Apple to fix the ongo­ing wire­less prob­lems I’ve got with the Net­gear router.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 12:21 pm and is filed under News, Personal.

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8 Responses to “Getting geekier by the minute”

  1. Gil said on: May 13th, 2005 at 4:31 pm

    http://www.slimdevices.com

    its like air­tunes, only it broad­casts to mul­tiple rooms.

  2. Allan White said on: May 14th, 2005 at 10:08 pm

    So, what backup soft­ware did you settle on?

  3. Mark Boulton said on: May 15th, 2005 at 9:16 am

    I haven’t settled on any­thing just yet. I’m still wait­ing for the deliv­ery (in fact dabs.com are being pretty slack about it all). 

    Ret­ro­spect would have been my first choice for work backup as I’ve used it before, and it select­ively saves into an archive rather than a one hit duplic­a­tion of an entire sys­tem. Although I’ve heard the Link­sys NSLU2 has prob­lems with Retrospect. 

    I should get the deliv­ery this week, so I’m sure I’ll be post­ing about some­thing going wrong!

  4. Chris Harrison said on: May 17th, 2005 at 3:29 pm

    Was it a Max­tor Firewire External HD??? It didn’t fail!!! Try hook­ing it up via USB instead. There is some­thing wrong with the Firewire Drivers for this HD in Tiger.

  5. Mark Boulton said on: May 17th, 2005 at 4:33 pm

    I’ve now settled on a OnetouchII, rather than the Lacie (as Dabs couldn’t get them in and also couldn’t tell me when they could!), so appar­ently it’s ‘on the van’ and I should have it this week. 

    Finally get to sort out all my mp3’s and photos!

  6. Chris Harrison said on: May 17th, 2005 at 4:38 pm

    I’ve been please with the Max­tor OneTouch thus­far… just know you might have an issue with Firewire and Tiger with the drive. USB will work without any probs.

  7. David Lee Hemphill said on: May 17th, 2005 at 7:48 pm

    I know it’s off sub­ject Mark, but you have been passed the baton. If you should hap­pen to not know what this means, then check out: 

    thebignoob.com 

    and 

    homeofthedave.com

  8. Mark Boulton said on: May 17th, 2005 at 8:48 pm

    Chris — Thanks for the heads up on the firewire issue. The Link­sys NSLU2 is USB only but I bought dual port just in case. 

    David — Thanks David, I’ve been try­ing not to get around to this ;-) As this is the fourth now, I think the pres­sure is on.

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