Steve very generously lent me his nslu2 (aka a slug) to play around with
https://homesuppor...­

ARM CPU in the 100s of mhz, 32mb of RAM, nic + 2 usb ports in a box. A
bunch of hacks available online to bring out the other 3 usb ports on
offer from the device.

There are a number of after market firmwares for the device
https://www.nslu2-...­

I gave SlugOS/BE a spin on it. After RTFMing it seems they want you to
specify the network settings before flashing. So I did that first. Then
used upslug2 to throw the firmware to the device over a wired
connection.

After initial setup in SlugOS you then setup a flash stick or hdd
partition to hold the "real" system. After that you get setup ipkg to
get additional packages and then have opkg (system) and ipkg (extras)
package managers to get software. NTFS works on the device (the 3g ntfs
is faster). Try to avoid installing samba, go with "samba36" instead. I
had huge issues with locales in the default 3.x samba which you get if
you do not explicitly ask for the later versions.

The main downside with the device is getting only 3-4Mb/s transfer over
samba. This is for single file at a time transfer of large contiguous
files. In contrast an old ARM at 1.2ghz can give 20Mb/s on the same
external HDD without any special treatment. I will tinker with using XFS
on the hdd in the future, which should help as about 25% of CPU was
being taken by the ntfs driver during read load.