I’ve linked to several articles covering this before, but none of them did the type of “walk-thru for dummies” approach that I was in desperate need of for quite some time. As a result, I felt like an idiot when I figured it out. To save others the same pain, I provide the following:
1. Plug at least one blank USB 2.0 drive into the NSLU2.
2. Plug the NSLU2 into your network and make sure your router and machine are both set to IP addresses in the 192.168.1.xxx family for setting up the device (you can change this later).
3. Launch your browser of choice and type in 192.168.1.77 (the NSLU2’s default IP address). You will be met with a web-interface to the device.
4. Click on Administration. You will be prompted for a login and password. Both are “admin” by default on the NSLU2.
5. You need to let the NSLU2 format your drive before you can make any changes. This is the stupid step that kept me scratching my head for far too long: To do this, you have to click on the “Advanced” link under the management tab. There you will find the “Disk” link that you had been searching for for hours and read so much about (d’uh). Click on it. You will most likely be prompted for the same admin/admin login and password again.
6. Now you will have a page that looks like this:
Here you can choose to format your disk. Click and wait. It took about 15 minutes to format my 200GB drive.
7. Now go and change all the passwords, create different user accounts / share spaces, etc. through the web-interface.
8. Once you’re done with all the configuration on the NSLU2, click on the Finder, choose Go–>Connect to Server… (or Command+K), type in “smb://192.168.1.77″ and click Connect. You will be prompted for a user name and password and you can choose whether to mount a share or the disk as a whole (if you didn’t set a data cap on the shares then all of these will be the size of your entire drive). Check the “Add to keychain…” (or whatever it is) box, so that you won’t have to re-enter this information each time you want to connect.
9. After the drive mounts, drag it to your Dock. Ta-da! Now you can connect to your NSLU2’s shared drive space whenever you like by simply clicking on that icon in the Dock!!!
Your USB drive is now formatted in ext3 format, so if you want to ever plug it directly into your Mac, you should go here and download this. If you want to do more crazy hacking with the device, check out these three articles and join the two Yahoo! Groups.
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Did basically the same thing as David. Found out that it had a address of 192.168.1.77, when I was running a 192.168.0.x lan address, so I used a standard Cat 5 cable and hooked it directly to my PM G5 and accessed the NAS directly. Changed the address on the NAS and then restarted it back on my router.
It found my Fat32 HD, but said my HFS+ needed formatting. Saw what you wrote about needing to format it using the NAS to format it as EXT3. That worked. Mounted it on my desktop and transferring the files via ethernet. Was hoping to avoid that problem since I will have to transfer about 150G via my Network instead of USB2/ Firewire ( my ext drives have both capabilities.. OUCH …my slower). Oh well, cant expect to get Gigabit ethernet on a $50 NAS, can I …??? So far so good.
This is helpful I think. I am using both a mac and a pc. I am using the linksys with an airport extreme and a western digital 1t hd. I had no trouble setting up on the linksys on my pc and no trouble on the mac book pro. I even got both to do auto backups. However at some point in the backup process on the mac–the linksys disappeared and I have not been able to get it to reappear. I can still access the linksys on my pc laptop and desktop. What am I missing?
Hmm… did your MacBook Pro switch wireless networks mid backup? Make sure you’re on the correct network and if so, you may need to flush the machine’s cache. To do so, download Onyx for OS X and give it a whirl.
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