Chris (Whites11) and several others have pointed that the source code for a device similar to Agestar have been released by a German company (http://www.multicase.de/en/products/76/ns348s.html). I have not looked carefully at the source code of this one, but none of the people on the mailing list have got it working with networking enabled.
Kari Ahtiala who owned several NAS devices (SLUG, NCB3AST, NCH3AHT), said that you can just move your disk from NSLU (SLUG) to Agestar just fine:
after upgrading the firmware, boot the Agestar without the disk, ssh to it, plug in the disk, mount it and chroot to it, and then mount -t proc /proc proc, and everything works as if the Agestar had been booted off the hard drive.
This is fine if you want to just borrow the disk for testing or cloning purposes. To convert it to be used on the Agestar exclusively, I copied /etc to /etc-slug (so I can revert by "mv etc etc-agestar" and "mv etc-slug etc" and enited fstab, network/interfaces and modules and issued the command "e2label /dev/sdb1 /" as you instructed.
And here are some tips from him:
I pretty much cloned my SLUG so the Agestar is now a NFS and Samba server, Web server and X server. The Xfce4 applications are usable on the Agestar – Mousepad is an OK editor and Thunar is OK for a file manager (these have a habit of Segfaulting, though, but at least X works: xterm, kpat, xpat2 and spider!). Using "ssh -CY" instead of "ssh -X" doesn’t seem to make much difference.
Usbmount is very useful: plug in a USB drive and it is accessible on your local network if you share /media via samba. Just edit /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf: the default filesystems are ext2 and ext3 but you can add vfat and ntfs but you need to add some options:
FS_MOUNTOPTIONS="-fstype=ntfs,rw,errors=remount-ro,dmask=0000,fmask=0000 -fstype=vfat,dmask=0000,fmask=0000"To get read-write on an NTFS drive, you need to cheat a bit: first install ntfs-3g and then
ln -s /usr/bin/ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs (this is because ntfs-3g is a program and the old ntfs is a module).
A tip from me is that if you have a problem with your Agestar, just search google for your problem, and add "NSLU" "debian" (or NSLU2 debian). The solution for debian NSLU2 should apply to Agestar with Debian.
I have Debian on my Agestar and I would like to upgrade the kernel to version 2.6.26.3. What things should I remember when I configure and compile the kernel? Which patch should I use? Would it be possible that you could make tutorial for compiling the kernel for agestar?
I have just written the tutorial for compiling the Linux kernel for agestar. I am planning to upgrade the latest one, but currently I still have no good reason to do it (no new features for me).
Is there any new features that you are looking for in the new kernel?
With your tutorial I’ve been able to upgrade and compile kernel to version 2.6.25.20, but if I try to upgrade to next version it doesn’t compile anymore. I would like to get shared writable mmap support (http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/226) to kernel, so I would need atleast kernel version 2.6.26. Would it be possible that you could try to create patch for 2.6.26 or newer kernel? I have tried to modify your patch but haven’t been able to get it work with newer kernel. Then I have another problem with usb-network adapters (rtl8150 and asix AX8817x based) I’ve compiled kernel with support for both of them but haven’t been able to get them to work. I can see them with lsusb and dmesg, but ifconfig or netstat won’t give me any info about them. I have tried to add eth1 interface to /etc/network/interfaces but it doesn’t help. Would you have any ideas which would help me to get another of those network adapters to work?