Today, not only did the NSLU2 that I bought on eBay arrive, but the red anodized aluminum case for my Alix arrived, too. Getting the NSLU2 to run “unslung” from a 1GB flash drive was a royal pain. If I do a second one, I’ll have to verify my technique, but it seems that the direction to format the drive before reflashing is just a mess (since it’s nearly impossible to get the Linksys firmware to format a flash drive), but once the firmware is reflashed to non-stock, it’s easy to format the flash drive, then run the script to move the boot stuffs off to the flash drive, where there’s room to install stuff. The problem is that the device seems to be spending about 90% of its time completely hung and non-responsive (telnet and ssh freeze ior maybe just hang, web interface unresponsive, intermittent “thrashing,” if you can call it that, of the flash drive) for reasons I can’t quite figure out. It may not turn out to be as useful as I’d hoped, but even if it doesn’t do what I want, it will have been an interesting experiment. Plus, I realized it’s the only linux box i’ve got on hand (my other machines are various Macs and OpenBSD boxes and a few PCs).
Speaking of OpenBSD boxes, the Alix seems to be much closer to usable than I’d expected now, having restarted from a newer pre-built flashdist image. The hokey thing I’d forgotten about is how few of the standard basic *nix command programs are in the base flashdist, so I end up copying over program after program from another running OpenBSD box. I’m hoping to get BIND and dhcpd up and running soon, get pf all set up for router/NAT/firewall use, and try it out with a DSL modem before the weekend is up.
And, with a little luck, by the end of the weekend, all these various devices will be self-updating the various common config files (BIND zones, dhcpd.conf, etc.) from a common server. I’ve already got a shell script that can check for an update to itself and replace itself with the newer version; I just have to make it check for and retrieve updates for the actual config files.
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[...] This means, of course, that I now have dhcpd and BIND running on my Alix. [...]