Installing Debian on the NSLU2 Fileserver

My first attmpt to reflash the NSLU2 with Debian Etch using the Debian Installer repeatedly failed while downloading packages from the mirrors (Next time I try it I'll make more detailed notes of what went wrong!) - so instead I used the manual method described here. This uses a tar ball prepared by Martin Michlmayr which just needs to be unpacked into the target filesystem.

Firstly, I partitioned the usb diskdrive. I plugged the drive into my laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 and used fdisk to create the required partitions. In order to match Martin's tar ball, I created /dev/sdb1 for the root partition (size 3000M), /dev/sdb2 as an extended partition from which I created /dev/sdb5 for the swap partition (700M) and /dev/sdb6 for the home partition (the remainder of the disk ~ 36G) are created. I also used fdisk to make /dev/sdb1 bootable and to change the type of /dev/sdb5 to 82 (Linux swap).

(...I had to reboot the laptop and then unmount the automounted usb disk before the next step...)

I then formatted the drive –

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb6
mkswap /dev/sdb5

- and mounted it on the laptop -

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp

I got the tar ball from -

wget http://people.debian.org/~tbm/nslu2/etch/base.tar.bz

- and unpacked it onto the root partition of the prepared drive -

cd /mnt/tmp
bzcat ~/base.tar.bz2 tar -xvf -

I then had to manually install the proprietary firmware that is needed for the in-built Ethernet chip, following the instructions on the NSLU2-Linux wiki describing how to extract this firmware from an installer image, as follows -

Firstly I downloaded the debian-installer image from slug-firmware.net and unpacked the image using slugimage (the version of slugimage packaged for Ubuntu was too old - I got my version from the Unslung CVS.)

slugimage -u -i di-nslu2.bin

- endian swapped the initramfs (ramdisk.gz).

devio '<< ramdisk.gz; xp $ 4' > ramdisk-swap.gz

- unpacked the initramfs

mkdir initrd; cd initrd
zcat ../ramdisk-swap.gz cpio -i

(there were lots of errors here relating to file permissions - but the firmware seems to have been extracted OK)

The NPE microcode firmware was in the initrd/lib/firmware directory - called NPE-B.01000201. I copied this file to /mnt/tmp/lib/firmware, and then created a symbolic link in /mnt/tmp/lib/firmware called NPE-B which points to NPE-B.01000201.

sudo cp NPE-B.01000201 /mnt/tmp/lib/firmware/
cd /mnt/tmp/lib/firmware; sudo ln -s NPE-B.01000201 NPE-B

The filesystem was now prepared, so I put the NSLU2 in upgrade mode and flashed the etch firmware image using upslug2 (the version packaged with Ubuntu was OK).

sudo upslug2 -i sda1-2.6.18.dfsg.1-12.bin

I connected the hard drive when upslug2 had finished and the NSLU2 rebooted the new Debian system. The system obtained an IP address via DHCP on eth0. I was able connect via SSH with user root and password root.

First thing I did was changed the root password -

passwd root

- regenerated the ssh keys

ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key -N '' -t rsa1

ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N '' -t rsa
ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N '' -t dsa

- edited /etc/network/interfaces to give a static IP address

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.77
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

- added a normal user andrew

adduser andrew

- changed the host name by changing 'foobar' to 'fileserver' in /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts

I then rebooted to make sure I could still log in (I could as user andrew and as root ...) then edited /etc/apt/sources.list to point to local mirrors as well as the contrib and non-free repositories -

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

and upgraded -

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

There was a kernel upgrade required, but no packages required updating.

Next - installing samba ...