Linksys NSLU2
 

Hey,

I'm currently thinking about purchasing a mass storage device for my home network. As I was researching I came across one by Linksys (Linksys NSLU2) I wanted to know if anyone here has purchased one or knows a little bit about it.

Is it a good choice for a smalle four computer home network? What are the pros and cons? Any guidance would be awesome!

Thanks,
Zeke

I own two NSLU2s and they're great. In fact, they happen to run Linux (you can actually replace the Linksys firmware with a number of Linux based firmwares that give you SSH or telnet access so you can access the internals of the device. I'd suggest reading http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ for more details.

One note about it is that I've found the network interface to be not particularly fast (though upgrading to the non-Linksys firmware or a later revision of the Linksys firmware helps). But it's a great little box for doing things like network back-uos and light to medium file serving.

Well, I understand that the Linux Community has hacked it so you can download a "mod" for it so that all file transfer is done with Bit Torrent so that should speed up the network file transfer time.

If you're talking about transferring files from the NSLU2 to your PC, how would using bittorrent help?

You understand what a Bit Torrent does correct. Bit torrent opens up as many connections as it can allowing it to send as many packages as it can. Thus, speeding up the transfer. Bit torrenting is now just used for downloading program hacks

Yes, I understand the concept of bittorrent. However, how will it help from one computer to another on a lan? The only way I could see this working is if both computers were multi-homed.