NSLU2: When the power supply (PSU) dies ...

Problem: My NSLU2 has stopped working. Problem pinned down to being the power supply. The following description matches very well my experience, although my power supply worked 24/7 for 3 years (the first two supplying a 2.5' disc.:

"It showed an interesting mode of failure.... after being used for about 1 year 24/7, the LED still illuminated and the unloaded votlage was 5.0V (good) but when a Slug was switched on, the voltage dropped to about 3V and the Slug could not boot. The Slug's Power LED showed faint 'pulsing' in time with USB Memory stick access attempts (difficult to see with your finger over the Power button though). The power supply was binned. "

Diagnose:
"It has been noticed that the supplied Linksys PSU appears to fail after about a year if supplying two USB powered 2.5" laptop drives from the NSLU2.Symptoms include, but not limited to hard drives not being mounted properly at boot time, although the slug will boot with no disks attached for a while until the supply dies completely." - nslu2-linux.org

My solution:
I bought a "AC Power Adapter/Charger for PSP 1000/2000/3000" from dealextreme.com. Then I exchanged the plug that the Power Adapter/Charger came with the plug from the original NSLU2 PSU. When doing this, BE CAREFUL and use a voltmeter/multimeter to make sure + and - are connected correctly. Double double check, because you might end up destroying your NSLU2 if applying a wrong voltage.

I did all this, and my slug is again running like a charm.

Debian NSLU2: How to install Debian on the NSLU2

Before we proceed with the installation of debian on the slug there is one point we bring in order:
We need a hard drive to install debian on.

My two slugs are installed in two different configurations:
Slug 1 (my home slug): A "WD Elements Desktop WDBAAU0010HBK 1 TB" (image) [Link 1, Link 2]

Slug 2 (my remote slug): A 4GB USB flash drive holding the operating system and a 300GB Maxtor hard drive  to hold the data.

I recommend to install the OS on a single exteramnal harddrive. And make sure you choose one which is silent and energy efficient. I can recommend the above (WD Elements Desktop WDBAAU0010HBK 1 TB), which has served me faithfully 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for a year now, but any other will do just fine.

Second thing which is important to do:

• Connect the slug to power and your home switch and turn it on.

• Set up the IP of the slug, the subnet mask and default gateway and the DNS server, in the native (the one the NSLU2 comes with) interface such that it is accessible from the local network and such that it has internet access. The reason for this is that the debian installation will inherit the network settings from the native setup and will use these during the setup.
• Download and install Putty if you are running from Windows. If running from linux, just the use the built-in ssh which is sufficient.
• A screendump of Putty connecting to the default IP address 192.168.1.77 is attached. The username is blanked out for security reasons.

• Find and download the Debian install firmware. Doublecheck 3 times that you have the right firmware. You will find the latest Debian firmware here (on the 25th of Oct. 2010). Here I have linked to the unofficial image, which is the one I highly recommend. It is also the one I used for both of my slugs.
• There is a great guide on how to install Debian on NSLU2 here on cyrius' page. It is the guide/page that I used myself. It is also the one containing the link to the Debian firmware.
• Flash the slug with the downloaded firmware through the native Linksys NSLU2 interface.
• Turn off the slug
• Connect the harddrive.
• Turn on/reboot the slug.
• In Windows Connect to the slug through Putty (don't use other ways of connecting such as Cygwin, they will fail during the process). Or in Linux run the command below. In any case the username is "installer" and password is "install".

$ ssh installer@192.168.1.77 

• Continue as described in Cyrius' guide.
• Choose to install to entire hard drive.
• Just use the Next, Next, Next approach whenever presented with a choice.
• While the installer is downloading and installing the packages it would be a good time for you to think about what name your server should have. In case you want to make it available online and are sitting behind a dynamic public IP address, it would be a good time to check whether this name is available at dynamic DNS services such as dyndns.com. The thing is, that there exists a dns-updater for Debian which I use, recommend and will introduce later. Therefore I recommend dyndns.com.
  Therefore: If you want to make the server available online, go to dyndns.com, find a available hostname which suits you (but choose with care as you might get unwanted visitors if you choose a domain name which is too common - Use your common sense!).
  Create an account (might as well be with the same username as you intend to use as domain name), "buy" the domain name (for 0.00$), active it etc.
• Let the installer finish.
• As any guide online will tell you: "it is recommended that you install the ntpdate (or ntp) package to make sure the clock is always up-to-date. "

$ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ntpdate 

 or

$ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ntp 

• There, we have installed a full Debian server on your slug. You now have a full server consuming 2W+whatever your hard drive consumes. In the next few articles I will describe how to install and configure services you might need/want.

Introducing the Linksys NSLU2

The first series in this blog will be on my implementation of Debian Linux on the Linksys NSLU2 (Wikipedia link).The Linksys NSLU2 is a quite old piece of hardware, and has gone out of production. However, I was only introduced to it a couple of years ago. Since then I have bought two of them, placed them in different locations and set them both up to run Debian and to sync data to each other.

One of them is located in my own basement, and the other in the basement of my brother. The advantage is obvious, considering that the one in my home is acting as my backup server. If I were to have a break-in or a fire, or a flood or a number of things, the other one will be a backup to my backup.

Furthermore the NSLU2 (aka the Slug) acts as file server, media server, iTunes server, running ftp server, http server and ssh server.

However, you will not get all of this for free... Which is reason I am writing this blog series. The slug comes with a native operating system (based on some Linux distribution). However, the posibilities with this version is highly limited.

A number of different alternative operating systems can be installed, as desribed on the website nslu2-linux.org.

However I chose Debian. The reason? That I then would get a full Linux server with the entire repository available on my NSLU2.

How I did it will follow... stay updated:-)