Lukas Rovensky's Weblog: Lukas Rovensky's Weblog

I finally found some time to play a bit more with the NSLU2 (Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives) from Linksys I bought many months ago.

Originally I used an old IBM Deskstar PATA hard drive, which I installed in Icy Box external case and connected to NSLU2. I also flashed NSLU2 with the Unslug firmware. I followed carefully all instructions at the Unslug web and everything worked fine including installation of a NFS server on the NSLU2 to be able to access the shared disk easily from Solaris boxes. Note, that NSLU2 is primarily intended for Windows users, so the default network file system support is limited only to SMB/CIFS protocol (Samba). This solution was OK for occasional backups and sharing data among computers on the home network (the old hard drive did not have too much capacity and was quite noisy).

Before Christmas I bought a new shiny Western Digital hard drive with much bigger capacity than the old disk. The goal was to use this disk not only for backups but also for sharing iTunes music and iPhoto library by the computers at home (mostly Mac's).

The iPhoto library was quite simple -- I just copied the library itself on the shared disk and then used the "option-open" feature of iPhoto (hold the option (alt) key when opening iPhoto), which makes possible to select a library to be used by iPhoto. This solution has one disadvantage -- only one user can work with the iPhoto data but this is not a problem for now.

Sharing iTunes was a bit more difficult and as the best solution turned out to be mt-daapd server (now re-branded as Firefly Media Server). I use one of the computers at home as primary source for the iTunes music and on as-needed basis I rsync the local data to the shared drive, so it can be used by iTunes running on other machines.

rsync is also used for backing up user's data.