OK, it’s time to reinstall my Linksys NSLU2 NAS device (petnamed ‘slug’) to finally put it into ‘production’. This is a list of steps that I have taken, together with some notes that might come in handy if I ever need to do this again.

1. Firmware upgrade, bring unslung to the most recent version.

2. Unling to a freshly formatted hard drive that is put in port 2. Make sure that after reboot the SLUG shows ‘the system is currently unslung’ when you log in.

3. Update the ipkg repos:

# ipkg update

# ipkg install unslung-feeds

# ipkg update

# ipkg upgrade

4. Install OpenSSH for secure remote access

# ipkg install openssh

5. Create the users and shares. I put all shares under /data/<sharename>. This can be defined when creating a share.

6. Install rsync for backing up the workstations on the lan:

# ipkg install rsync

edit /opt/etc/rsyncd.conf to contain the share you want to make available, make sure to restrict access as much as possible (see example file placed there by the previous command)

edit /opt/etc/rsync.secrets to contain a <username>:<password>  line

restart the service

7. Install the native development toolchain to be able to compile programs on the slug

# ipkg install unslung-devel

8. Other packages you might want to install:

• less
• cron
• ntpclient
• curl
• perl-libwww (for my NOAA query script to gather local weather info)