So it is a great thing when a piece of hardware you bought turns out to run Linux. Serendipity specifically related to electronics and ability to run FOSS, maybe opendipity?
I had bought the Western Digital MyBook NAS device because it of the network attached nature, the 1 TB size, and what I thought was the ability to also use it via USB.
While that last assumption did not turn out to be completely true, the box is great. There is an incredible wiki over here: MyBook World Edition Wiki.
First, I setup SSH and installed Optware. Optware is the package manager for the MyBook, like Portage for Gentoo or APT for Debian.
After that, the main thing I was using it for was torrents.
Transmission is the program, which is really nice and has a great GUI.
Tonight I finally was able to compile SABNzbPlus for the MyBook. This is great because I have one whole computer dedicated to this application and can now take it out of commission. It is an older computer, so I’m sure I will save some energy and kill the earth less quickly. Although it is nice to have this running, it seems like the downloads are quite a bit slower than on the desktop that is running SAB now; 300KB/s vs 800KB/s is not an insignificant difference.
I am now considering getting another one to serve as a print server, iTunes server, and also to figure out how to use it for SVN. I don’t have a machine doing these at the moment, so this would be extra overhead, but stuff I have wanted to do for a while.
One issue I have now is that Optware doesn’t seem to update. I can manually install packages by wget-ing them from the feed located here:
http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/mbwe-bluering/cross/unstable/
UPDATE
I have discontinued using the Blue Light MBWE for SAB. It is just too taxing on the resources of the box (specifically for larger files). It was crashing every day or so on the par/unpack phase.
CUPS
Now I am setting up the MBWE to serve as the CUPS server for my home office. Basically, it is a pretty simple operation, just follow the guide. Note the guide is for MBWE Blue Light edition. The wiki contains instructions for the White Light as well.
I had to play around with the Allow/Deny because my home network doesn’t use a 192.168.X.X subnet.
photo credit: Olivier Bruchez