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My external USB hard-drive packed up recently and I found myself in the need of a new one. I mentioned this to a friend whom suggested a 1Tb NAS unit at PC World for just £149.99.

"Bargain" I said.

I googled the item in question and beholden -- it runs Linux!  At its heart lies Oxford Semiconductors's OXE800SE, a nifty little chip based around an ARM926 processor (presumably) modified to incorporate Ethernet, SATA & USB.

 Oxford Semiconductor proudly display themselves as a key component in Western Digital's recent MyBook, and rightly so. The box makes a perfect headless Linux terminal with bundles of hard-disk space.

Chances are you might be one of the small community of people that have already bought one and are exploring its potential. I see someone has started discussion in the Gentoo Arm community -- good going!

If you don't know of the SSH hack already head on over to Martin Hinner's website for instructions on enabling sshd. Once that's installed you can connect remotely via ssh , default user/pass is root/root, and optionally run passwd to set a new root password.

Once you're in the best option for installing new packages is OptWare. The excellent WD MyBook wiki has an article here.  OptWare includes a utility for installing (and removing) pre-compiled binary packages for the arm processor.

I've been playing:

• rsyncd to sync my backups from Linux
• nfsd for file sharing (better for Linux than CIFS/Samba)
• postfix for receiving email (lol!) -- it runs a little slow
  
• mediatomb for sharing media files with the PS3 via uPNP
• gkrellmd -- more info here
  

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