Ladies and gentleman, let me please introduce you to my new server, the one I’ve been blogging about lately:

What? You don’t see it? Yes! The small grey box on top of the iomega disk, slightly bigger than the Fonera…

In case you don’t know it yet, it’s a Linksys NSLU2, a small device around $100 that comes with two USB2 ports and an ethernet connection. Plug an external USB hard drive to it and it’ll become available over the network like a NAS share. And the best part is: you can flash its firmware and install Debian!!

It’s not that powerful, it has an XScale (ARM) processor at 266Mhz and only 32Mb of RAM. There are pages explaining how to install up to 256Mb. Nevertheless, it works and is small, doesn’t make noise, and has a small electrical consumption.

Up to now I’m running the following on it and it works quite well:

• djbdns
• netatalk
• mldonkey!!!
• samba, so that I can watch movies directly on myh XBox with XBox Media Center

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: XScale-IXP42x Family rev 2 (v5l)
BogoMIPS	: 266.24
Features	: swp half fastmult edsp
CPU implementer	: 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0x41f
CPU revision	: 2
Cache type	: undefined 5
Cache clean	: undefined 5
Cache lockdown	: undefined 5
Cache format	: Harvard
I size		: 32768
I assoc		: 32
I line length	: 32
I sets		: 32
D size		: 32768
D assoc		: 32
D line length	: 32
D sets		: 32

Hardware	: Linksys NSLU2
Revision	: 0000
Serial		: 0000000000000000

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         29988      28988       1000          0        404       4808
-/+ buffers/cache:      23776       6212
Swap:       979924      41164     938760

# uname -a
Linux eliza 2.6.18-6-ixp4xx #1 Tue Feb 12 00:57:53 UTC 2008 armv5tel GNU/Linux

# pstree
init-+-afpd---afpd
     |-atalkd
     |-atd
     |-avahi-daemon---avahi-daemon
     |-cnid_metad
     |-cron
     |-dbus-daemon
     |-events/0
     |-getty
     |-khelper
     |-klogd
     |-ksoftirqd/0
     |-kthread-+-aio/0
     |         |-kblockd/0
     |         |-khubd
     |         |-3*[kjournald]
     |         |-kmirrord
     |         |-kpsmoused
     |         |-kseriod
     |         |-kswapd0
     |         |-2*[pdflush]
     |         |-scsi_eh_0
     |         `-usb-storage
     |-mtdblockd
     |-nmbd
     |-papd
     |-portmap
     |-rpc.statd
     |-slpd
     |-smbd---smbd
     |-sshd---sshd---sshd---bash---su---bash---pstree
     |-svscanboot-+-readproctitle
     |            `-svscan-+-supervise---dnscache
     |                     |-3*[supervise---multilog]
     |                     |-supervise---tinydns
     |                     `-supervise---mlnet---mlnet---mlnet
     |-syslogd
     `-udevd

After recompiling netatalk the other day in order to get it to work with Leopard, the next step was getting Time Machine to make backups over the network (and a wireless one by the way).

Problem is: despite the netatalk-powered network shares worked great for “regular” files, when Time Machine started preparing the backup it always gave me an error.

Googling about it I’ve found several stories with different soluctions, some of which worked for some people, some others didn’t. The one that did it for me is this one:

• Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard

Basically it consists in creating a “sparse bundle” disk image on the local hard drive using MacOS X’s Disk Utility, giving it a specific name, moving it to the network share and then configure Time Machine to use that share.

Worked for me.

I’m installing a new fileserver at home (more on this one of these days…) and after installing the netatalk package I wasn’t able to connect to it from MacOS X Leopard, it returned an error after the user/pass prompt.

Googling about it I’ve found that you need to recompile the netatalk package, more info on this and a detailed step-by-step here: Make Netatalk talk to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)