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12/03/2004: "How to Set up an NSLU2 with a Mac (For Dummies Like Me)"
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.
