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rsync on a Linksys NAS200 NAS

Because the price of electricity rose by about 20% in my part of Switzerland during the last months, I was searching for a low-power backup solution for some servers. The Linksys NAS 200 seemed to be the perfect solution: a small box with an open source firmware based on a Linux 2.6.9 kernel. So I ordered one with 2 500GB SATA disks, planning to run it as an rsync server.


I downloaded the V34R62 firmware source code from Linksys, uncompressed it, went to rsync’s website to grab the version 2.6.9 source code and started to integrate it to the firmware source. It was quite easy, I just had to modify rsync’s Makefile and it all compiled well. Some modifications to the startup scripts later, rsync was up and running on this little beast.

It works fine, except that the filesystem on the NAS 200 is XFS, so some files like symbolic links in ext3 don’t backup correctly. And god is it slow, gooood is it sloooowww...forget any type of compression during rsync transfers. The chip inside the NAS is a 486-class FPU-less CPU, and you can see that...

Edit: I wrote a howto about it here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under General Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “rsync on a Linksys NAS200 NAS”

  1. Andrew Says:
    April 1st, 2008 at 5:40 am

    I’d love to get the firmware - I’m also trying to setup a backup system for my home computers.

  2. Steven Says:
    April 1st, 2008 at 6:24 am

    Ok, I’ll write a little guide on how to set it up and contact you again via e-mail...
    PS: how many disks do you plan to use, and in which configuration?

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