Hardware

[mdlbear]

Last Wednesday (i.e., just before we left for ConChord) my wireless router stopped working -- the lights were on, the web interface worked fine, but no wireless connections. Even power-cycling it didn't work. My guess is that I zapped the RF section in the course of installing the new high-gain antennae.

Yesterday I saw in Central Computing's ad that they had the same model, Linksys WRT54G, for about $60. I also noticed that they had the Linksys NSLU2 NAS gadget on sale. I stopped in on my way home.

They gave me a rain check on the NSLU2 (I picked it up this afternoon -- more on that below); I spent much of yesterday evening configuring the router. The reason I picked the WRT54G is that, being Linux-based, it's easily customized -- there are already half a dozen different distributions for it. OK, so now I have a little ARM-based Linux box, in the form of my old router, that I can still experiment with. In particular, I have one machine doing odd jobs on the network, like being a DHCP server and shuffling print jobs between LPR (Unix) and SMB (Windows) interfaces. No need to waste an entire 500MHz K6 on it, which is what I'm doing now.

This brings me to the NSLU2, otherwise known as the Slug. It's nominally a file server: it has an ethernet port and two USB ports into which you plug USB storage devices. Which, being a Linux box at heart, it promptly offers (through its web interface) to reformat as ext3. As with the router, there are several different distributions available for it. I intend to see whether it has enough power to use for audio recording. And in any case, I can use it for backups.

Comments

[penngwyn.livejournal.com]

I've had RF sections die on a couple of Cisco APs (PoE, so I don't think it was a power line glitch or anything obvious like that). I'm not sure how durable those circuits are in general.

[mdlbear]

Probably not very -- the receiver front-end, in particular, is likely to be static-sensitive.