Journal

Life with a ‘Slug’

  • Posted on: May 20, 2005
  • In: News
  • Comments closed

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.

Comments

Since OS X is unix based there’s the excellent rsync utility available. You can get a GUI for it (google rsyncx) but it’s pretty easy to writea shell scriptto automate the process. Here’s a sample of the one I set up:

pathtobackup=/Volumes/External/Backup/;
if
cd $pathtobackup
then
echo “Directory found. Data will be backed up to:”
echo “ “$pathtobackup"..."
echo

echo “Beginning Backup”
echo “----------------”

echo “ Backing up Documents...”
rsync -a --delete ~/Documents $pathtobackup

echo “ Backing up iTunes library...”
rsync -a --delete ~/Music/iTunes $pathtobackup

echo “ Backing up Mail library...”
rsync -a --delete ~/Library/Mail $pathtobackup

echo “ Backup complete...”
echo
else
echo “External Drive is NOT MOUNTED.”
fi

The options I’ve used will result in a mirror of the directories you sync. I have it backup up to a drive attatched over firewire, but I also backup some important documents to my network drive at university, which uses Samba. You can then run the scriptfrom terminal, I hacked together a little applescriptwhich sits in my dock and invokes the shell script. Feel free to ask if there’s anything else you’d like to know about this.

quis's Gravatar

quis
Fri 20th May 2005
at 12:09 pm

I know this confirms my ubergeekdom, but I find this kind of thing very exciting...almost makes me want to reconfigure my backup drives to see if I can make any improvements.

Mark, one little app I found useful in my backup networking was Sharpoints.

Among other things, it lets you share mounted volumes to a PC over the network through a tidy GUI.

This may not be an issue for you if your backup drive is networked, but for anyone with a Firewire drive it’s very helpful.

Adam Thody's Gravatar

Adam Thody
Fri 20th May 2005
at 12:31 pm

For some information about customising it to run software other than just shares, like the iTunes server you mentioned check out this article about unslung.

David Parrott's Gravatar

David Parrott
Fri 20th May 2005
at 1:09 pm

Thanks guys. I’ve settled on still using Retrospect as it works pretty well with my pc too.

Next thing is trying to set up the iTunes server. I’ve followed the article but am unsure on how to do even the most basic of strange Unix things like “untarring to the Slug’s root”

:-(

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Wed 25th May 2005
at 6:36 pm

Have you looked at nslu2-linux.org

A group that is creating replacement firmware for the SLUG, one retains the basic functionality, one replaces everything with a custom embedded linux version.

Very fun to play with.

Jon's Gravatar

Jon
Thu 26th May 2005
at 7:36 pm

how did you get around the 192.168.1 issue? i am having similar issues on my router.

Gil's Gravatar

Gil
Tue 7th Jun 2005
at 9:24 pm

Commenting is not available in this section entry.

Next entry: Some thoughts about signs

Previous entry: Five simple steps to better typography - Part 5

A picture of Mark BoultonI'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.

If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.