I picked this little jewel up this weekend, after poking around trying to find some kind of NAS that would be live when the laptop is on the move. It’s tough to be tethered to the USB drives when I wanna be on the back deck editing photos! 🙂

The dings on the device are (from other’s reports) that it is tough to get a drive to format, and that the formatted drive is not Windows-compatible. The format isn’t of concern to me, as the drive(s) hanging off the NAS will be just that… NAS!

However, the format thing has been a bear. I finally got my USB drive to format using the built-in, web-based Linksys utility…… but, the message I got from the unit indicated that the format failed. For now, it seems to be working, but I don’t yet trust it.

So far, the device has been functional from the Windows side — easy to use. From the linux side, though, the story is different. I am having trouble mounting the filesystem to the linux box with permissions where non-root accounts can write to it. I could do everything as root, but that’s really not my preference.

There’s a ton of folks hacking on this little box, too. There’s a great deal of info coming out of batbox.org. Using some suggestions from there, I was able to turn on telnet on the unit (went to http://localdevice-IP/Managemenet/telnet.cgi and turned it on), which allowed me to login with ourtelnetrescueuser (using welcome as the password). I can see that the directories being created by the NSLU2 on the USB drive are correctly chmod’d, so my difficulty has to be somewhere in the mount process.

More tinkering to do……

UPDATE: I discovered the problem with my mount command. The correct command is
smbmount //NAS-IP/filesystem /mnt/nas-dir -o guest,rw,uid=guest,gid=everyone,fmask=777,dmask=777
That solved it!