Welcome to
Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Some time ago, I bought a LinkSys NSLU2, that's a very cute little box with power, usb and network plugs, and nothing more. Inside sits an ARM processor and 16MB RAM. The great thing is: You can install linux on it, even a complete Debian sarge installation.

The box is not very performant, even after I de-underclocked it by scraping away a resistor from 133MHz to 266Mhz, but it is quite cheap and very handy. I use it for nightly backups. Unfortunately, the attached external Maxtor OneTouch harddrive is quite loud, even when it is idle. Here are the steps I took to make the setup zero-noise as long as the slug is doing nothing:

• Set the spin down time for the hard drive using sdparm.
• Use noatime on all mounted disks.
• Use ext2, not ext3. (maybe that is not necessary, I'll try with ext3 some time)
• Run syslogd with "-m 0" to get rid of the 20-minutes "--MARK--" entries. (For debian, set it in /etc/init.d/sysklogd)
• Of course, only run stuff you actually need
• And the final step, just figured out: Mount /var/run on a tmpfs. Daemons like openvpn seem to write there on regular intervals, so keep these away from the hard drive.

Some further plans for my slug involve a USB attached LCD display and a temperature sensor, so I can be informed about various stuff, incuding the outside temperature, even with my regular computer off. Suggestions of what hardware I could use is highly appreciated.