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Unslinging a NSLU2 – a few comments for beginners

It doesn’t need to be emphasized more that to read http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ is a complete must for everyone who would like to experiment with updating the original Linksys firmware of a NSLU2 device. Especially, the community rules and and the (extensive) set of warnings should be read and understood before descending into countless Howto’s. I’m grateful to all folks who contributed with all the information – following the steps and Howto’s I unslung my NSLU2 with Unslung-6.8-beta-firmware without problems. I have only experienced two minor issues and would like to mention them here just in case some NSLU2 beginner (like myself) comes across the same.

Both of the two issues demonstrate how important is to really pay attention to all details when flashing the NSLU2 firmware, even by experienced heavy-weights. It really doesn’t pay off to skip ahead! Firstly, after a successful flash, I didn’t know how to proceed with unslinging the firmware to external USB disk drive, rather than keeping it in the internal flash storage (all this in order to be able to start installing additional packages, such as openssh etc). I could not find the instructions on any of the two above websites. After a little moment I found the detailed and very well written instructions packaged inside the zip file with the firmware (Unslung-6.8-beta-README.txt).

The second problem occurred, how surprising, again after I skipped ahead a tiny bit of the README file. I connected the external USB disk to the port 1 and executed

/sbin/unsling disk1

This, however, did not work, the disk was not found (and it wasn’t displayed in the Linksys web interface either). I assumed the problem was the fact that I’ve formatted the disk already before, with the original NSLU2 firmware. Because I didn’t have any important data on the disk yet, I decided to use the web interface to format the disk again. Despite the “Formatting…” message in the interface, there was no disk activity and the disk again wasn’t recognized after the subsequent reboot. After consulting the README file and actually following what was written there (i.e. using the port 2) the disk was recognized and I could continue. The disk, formatted using the NSLU2 in question with the original Linksys firmware, did not have to be re-formatted to work with Unslung-6.8-beta, the data are accessible without problems. The only this that changed was the Samba share name assigned by the device by default (DISK 2 instead of DISK 1).

I guess the moral of the story is that README files are here to be read and in case of anything related to NSLU2 firmware upgrade read at least twice.