Bought myself a new toy, a Linksys NSLU2. Ostensibly, this is a network-attached storage device: plug one or two USB hard drives into it, stick it on your router or switch, and you can access the drives from anywhere on your network. Under the cover, it's a 266 MHz Intel network processor (underclocked to 133 MHz by an easily removed resistor) running a variant of Linux in firmware. And it can be flashed with a couple of different replacement Linux kernels to make it capable of doing more than just serving files on a network (for example, you can turn it into a Web server that fits in the palm of your hand).

One of the things I'd like to do with this is to turn it into a picture storage device for our trip to England next year: hook up a USB memstick reader and a hard drive, and every time I fill up a memstick from the digital camera, just stuff it in the reader and the NSLU2 will move the files off of it and onto the hard drive. Should be a piece of cake to do once I've got a less restricted version of Linux running on it; and since I already have all the components, it'll certainly be cheaper than buying enough memsticks to last a week in England.

I figured I'd just try out its basic functions before reflashing the firmware, just to make sure it wasn't defective. Since I didn't want to clean off any of my external hard drives yet, I figured I'd try it with a 512 MB flash drive. The NSLU2 won't format flash drives, so I plugged the drive into my Linux box, partitioned it and formatted it in the required fashion, stuck a test file on it, and plugged it into the NSLU2. Browsed to it from my XP box, and... no file. Tried again from the Linux box. No file. Okay. So I copied a file onto it from my XP box, and I could see it from the Linux box. Strange.

So I powered down the NSLU2, put the flash drive on my Linux box (since XP can't read EXT3 filesystems), and... found the test file I'd put on there before moving it to the NSLU2 in the first place. The file I'd put on from the XP box was nowhere to be found. Moved the flash drive back to the NSLU2, and there was the file from the XP box, but not the test file from the Linux box.

What the hell?