Sheevaplug

I bought myself a new toy for xmas from NewIt, a Sheevaplug. It’s a low power, ARM linux device. I plan to use it as a network attached storage maybe backup. The SheevaPlug has Ubuntu 9.04 pre-installed. Apparently its only draws 4 watts. I’m adding this to remind me of the basic setup I did if I ever have to do it again.

You can use the USB cable it comes with the get tty access, but I couldn’t be bothered, I’m happy enough to use the provided OS filesystems etc. Just plugged it in, waited a couple of minutes and use the standard root password.

The device was called UBUNTU on my routers config.

The forum at NewIt recommends regerating keys.

As I want to use it for a storage I attached my usb hard drive, typed in ls /dev/ expecting to see an entry for a hdd something like sda1. The drive was lighting up; I could hear it spinning up repeatedly.

Nothing there, so I swapped it for a memory stick, which seems to work fine. I’m guessing that the drive is drawing more than the 500ma that USB are supposed to draw. I installed lsusb and checked for the device, which didn’t appear. I added a hub, with external power supply, and attached the USB drive via that and it worked fine. Now its easy to mount the drive (my drive happens to be a WD Passport:

mkdir /media/WDPassport/
sudo mount /dev/disk/by-label/WD\\x20Passport /media/WDPassport/

Added a new user so that I don’t have to log in as root.

adduser daveh

and add to sudoers list to stop me from making stupid mistakes

visudo

annoyingly it uses vi, add the line with i

daveh ALL=(ALL) ALL

then :wq to write the file and exit

Do an apt-get update so that apt has the correct locations to get packages from.

I changed the MOTD for so I know I’m definitely booting from the SD card.

I’d also like to use it to serve my music up, so I’ve installed mt-daap. This was pretty straight forward.

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