One of my hobbies for last few weeks has been hacking around with an Asus WL-700gE. It’s a fun little NAS / wireless router with a 160Gig hard drive. I flashed it with OpenWrt Kamikaze 7.09 and use it is for general data storage. Thanks go out to the wl700g.homelinux.net which helped me through all this. I’ve got my macs backing up to it with rsync, I run Subversion for my personal doc storage and I off-line some backups from a remote server that I have running. I’ll get our photos syncing next. The disk is a little noisy, but at least it can be configured to spin down when nothing is accessing it.

The whole process of installing Kamikaze made me think much about development for mobile devices. It definitely makes you aware of your footprint and focus you on what you really need – you’ve got a lot less room to move around in and getting Linux in under 64Mb is pretty neat. It makes you realise how big Apache is and send you in search for other lightweight HTTP server alternatives such as lighttpd. I am, however, a little jealous of a mate who’s moved up to a Mac Mini for essentially the same purpose, but a lot shinier – given that I’ve already blown my IT spend for the next few months I’ll just have to wait.