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LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)

Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)

And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!

Is it? Remarkably bad performance for a linux box. I was thinking of this linux distro for linksys routers. Maybe it's the hardware. /shrug

It's still no substitute for a real firewall IMO.

IpCop
Smoothwall
m0n0wall

I've played with perhaps a dozen little firewall distros like these and I'd prefer any of them to the default linksys setup. These three are my favorites for features, power, ease of use, speed, and tinkering ability. m0n0wall isn't easy to tinker with, but runs quite well from a 6MB ISO image and strikes me as pretty unhackable. Maybe someone should hack that onto the linksys.

But instead of paying for the firmware, just get bsd and possible use that old machine for something that needs... I don't know, storage?

Because he's not talking about any old PC. Take a ook at this page. See the little box next to tux? That's no PC, it's a Linksys wrt54g wireless router. I still wouldn't recommend buying the firmware though. The Sveasoft guy has proven to be a real arsehole, trying to force people to pay for his firmware based on Linux and other open-source software.

Jeez, if you want a microserver, check out a kurobox... it uses Linux. Or maybe go and mod a Linksys NSLU2. Both of these products are $185, and come with NAS/light server profile software already, and are hackable.

How about the Linksys NSLU2? No wireless but you can buy a WET-11 Ethernet bridge for it if you want. Also, it can run Linux, and with the addition of a regular access point and a USB Ethernet adapter it'd probably work pretty good as a router.

since you mentioned the wrt54g you might be also interested in the Linksys NSLU2. It's got a single ethernet port, dual usb ports and can run linux. Attach a usb harddrive to it and you can use it for your file/mail server. The open source firmwares aren't as polished as, say sveasoft but it seems to me that you're the type that might enjoy getting it working.

The WRT54G isn't the only thing from Linksys that runs Linux. The NSLU2 is a designed to be a NAS solution. But you can hack the firmware to run practically whatever you want. Supports up to two hard drives (connected via USB) and has an Intel XScale (ARM) processor. It has no fans, so the only noise comes from the drive(s) you attach to it. You can pick one up for about $80.

Speed: The USB 2.0 Hi-Speed FAQ tells us that the maximum speed of USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s. The maximum speed of parallel ATA is 133 MByte/s = 1064 MBit/s, plus it does not have the "ATA over USB" protocol overhead. Serial ATA does 150 MByte/s = 1200 MBit/s, IIRC. The ethernet interface of the device supports 100 MBit/s. Modern harddisks can not deliver 133 MByte/s = 1064 MByte/s, but they become faster every day. Flash memory can be that fast, at least for reading.

Power: Each USB port must be able to deliver 5V @ 0.5A.

Now do the maths: You can see that already a single USB device can deliver more data than the ethernet port could transport. The CPU (according to http://www.batbox.org/nslu2-linux.html) is an XScale CPU with 131.48 BogoMIPS, roughly comparable in Performance to a slow Pentium II. I'm sure it can't handle much more than 100 MBit/s Ethernet and two USB 2.0 ports.

Adding a second USB port is convenient to copy data directly between USB devices, e.g. for backup or upgrade purposes. But adding more USB ports costs 0.5A per port for the PSU, making it much more inefficient for each added port.

Tux2000

What does the ideal NAS distribution look like to you?

Like this Linksys box. It is silent and cheap and has Linux inside.

Swap the letters around to get NSLU2. Fortunately, it's a lot like the Linksys WRT54G... eg. infinitely hackable.

I wonder if anyone has tried installing this on a Linksys WRT54g

I just bought one 2 days ago and set it up, I think it did have security on by default- but the admin passwd is just admin by default. Gotta be simple on some level for end-users I suppose.

batbox, EWRT or OpenWRT will let you really have fun with this hardware.

Juniper builds routers based on intel proccessors and a shell built on FreeBSD.

That's not silly at all, though not exactly linux, but it shows things like this are done. Also, you can check this linksys router running linux.

...customized Linux firewall distro...Much more customizable than a Linksys box.

Well, this site seems to disagree that your old pentium II box is more flexible than at least some linksys routers.

My google search found a number of results, including Linux on the WRT54G and a result from broadband reports.

In a related note, Linksys/Broadcom have released source code and the toolchain used in the wrt54g access point. They even have instructions on how to build your own firmware.

Everything you need to build your own firmware is available in version 1.42.2

Note that my wrt54g linux distribution won't work with version 1.42.2 unless your modify the firmware to re-enable the wrt54g "ping hack"

Most of these enhancements to the stock WRT54G can be accomplished as changes to it's filesystem's ramdisk so that they are not permanent and a simple reboot of the router will get you back to the non-hacked state. If you're feeling brave however, you can try to create your own firmware and commit it to flash at the risk of messing up and creating a small doorstop out of a perfectly good router.

Unfortunately the built in capabilities accessed via it's HTTP interface are a bit slim and simplistic (ie. no SNMP router logging and the built in logging capabilities are VERY basic, only 5 port filters, no Static IP assignments based on MAC addresses, no port triggering) but par for a home/office grade router. Besides, you could always add what you want via your root linux access neh?

Reviews of the router performance have been positive, with little difference in bandwidth in running with WEP on or off (unlike many other inexpensive wireless routers, which have up to a 50% reduction in wireless bandwidth with encryption turned on).

Pretty exciting to have a little router that has the potential to do much more than the usually lukewarm manufacturer's firmware allows.

Dave

Well, after you've gotten into Linux on your Linksys router, when you have the source there's things you can make the hardware do that the original designers did not think of.

Here is the direct link to the distribution for those who dare. 1098kB in size.

It sounds like you're looking for one of these. It's a wireless b/g router, 4 port switch, 125 Mhz MIPS processor running Linux 2.4.5 with 16 meg of ram. You can pick one up for around $100. I'm running snort on mine.

well, if they want to use grayscale mosaic to "obfuscate" their video transmissions, then I guess thats a good thing ;-)
*jk* - i think its cool.

I just did a quick search on a couple of my pages. Searches for either "bat house" or "bat poetry" list my pages first. Of course the subject is a bit specialized... :-)

http://batbox.org/

I ran Cat-5 through my house recently, and I'm happy with the results. Here's a few tips :

If you are going to pull cable through the walls, do it with two pairs just in case you need another later or in case something goes wrong with one. ( bulk Cat-5 is cheap, 5 cents a foot ). You might even consider leaving a string/wire between the end-points in the walls where you ran a cable so you can use it in the future.

Crimping your own ends on the cables will save a lot of money and is not too hard.

You only need 4 wires for ethernet. I used the other 4 for a serial connection to my Bat House, I think this is a very common use of the extra wires :-)

I've got the only Linux Powered Bat House in the world.
And it's on the Internet here