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.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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.

  • Me

    Hello. My name is Mark Boulton. I’m a designer, an author, a speaker and I run a small design agency where we work with lovely cli­ents and pub­lish books as we go. This is my blog.

  • More of me

  • Publications

    Design­ing for the Web
    Start­ing from £19 + VAT for a PDF Down­load. £29 for a full col­our paperback.

  • Where I work

    Mark Boulton Design
    A small design stu­dio doing good things for nice clients.
    Five Simple Steps
    Pub­lish­ing easy to read design books.

  • See me speak

    @Media 2010
    June 8th — 11th, Lon­don, UK.
    Drupal­Con 2010
    August 23th — 27th, Copen­ha­gen, Denmark.
    dCon­struct 2010: Design 1010 workshop
    Septem­ber 1st, Brighton, UK.
    Web­d­a­gene
    Septem­ber 29th — Octo­ber 1st, Oslo, Norway
    Web Developers Conference
    Octo­ber 27th, Bris­tol, UK.
    New Adven­tures in Web Design
    Janu­ary 20th 2011, Not­ting­ham, UK.

    • Copyright © 1999–2010 Mark Boulton. Made with an Apple Mac in Wales. Running on WordPress and VPS.net.