[Lancaster] pet slug

[andy baxter]

Hi all,

Last week I bought a 'slug' (linksys NSLU2 ethernet appliance) on eBay. 
It's just arrived in the post today. It's a tiny thing, about the size 
of my hand, with 2 usb2 ports and an ethernet port on the back, and a 
233 MHz ARM processor inside. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 .

It's meant for plugging usb hard drives into - you can plug in 2 drives 
and they come up as windows network shares. I've tested it like this, 
and it seems pretty good - fast enough to stream video over the network. 
But the important point is its based on linux, and is reflashable, so 
you can put pretty much anything you like on it. I'm looking forward to 
putting debian on it and setting it up as a home web server and whatever 
else I can think of. Being silent and low power, I'm happy leaving it 
switched on all the time in my flat, which I wasn't with the old, rather 
noisy, machine I had before.

andy