Need a small server? Unleash the Power of the Slug

Anyone who’s wandered the aisles of their friendly neighborhood big-box computer store has seen the shelves full of hard drives. These basically come in two flavors: internal hard drives, which get mounted inside of your computer, and external hard drives, which connect to your computer through a USB (or FireWire) cable.

You’ll also find small devices that allow you to connect your external hard drive to your home network instead of connecting it directly to your computer. One of these devices is made by Linksys, and it goes by the official name of “NSLU2″. It’s more commonly known by its unofficial name: “The Slug”.

The Slug is nothing more than a very small computer. It has an Intel processor, a little bit of memory (32MB), and it runs a flavor of Linux as its OS. Since it uses Linux the nice people at Linksys, in order to be compliant with Linux licensing, had to publish the modifications which they made to Linux in order to get it to run within the Slug, Once those modifications became publicly known it was only a matter of time before some enterprising hackers figured out how to extend the Slug beyond it originally intended purpose.

In a nutshell you can run all types of applications — web servers, FTP servers, SSH servers, music servers, web cams — through this little device which is just a hair bigger than a deck of cards. It’s not exactly a super-computer but it does OK for itself, especially considering that it’s original purpose was to mount a USB hard drive onto a home network. Oh, and it still serves that purpose, even while running all of the other applications.

If you have a small website or a low-volume SSH or FTP server that you run at home and you’d rather not have a server running all of the time consider installing and modifying a Slug to handle the job for you. It’ll set you back about $80 but you’ll be able to turn off your “real” server, not to mention having that external hard drive mounted on your network.

Just don’t pour salt onto it.

For a detailed look at how to hack the Slug and great step-by-step instructions on how to install Slug-compatible applications visit nslu2-linux.org.

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