I picked up a 1 TB Western Digital My Book World from Fry's today - that's a 1 Terabyte Gigabit Network Attached Storage box - for $220. I've seen a few consumer technical appliances that run Linux under the covers, and haven't been terribly impressed with many of them. So far however, this box is slick. While WD doesn't support Linux officially (bad WD!) it is pretty trivial to get the box into a techie-friendly state.

With only an hour or so of tinkering, I was able to enable ssh, disable the java server, add my own users, and mount my partitions via sshfs. The info on doing this is already covered by "Paul" at his How to setup My Book World Edition II page so I won't duplicate that here. Should also probably link to Martin Hinner's My Book Howto directly as he appears to have done the hard work. I'll spend the next few days figuring out how to best make use of this device; most likely looking into something like rdiff-backup.

Something they don't mention are the specs of this little beauty, for those of you who might care, read on...

[root@MyBookWorld ~]# uname -a
Linux MyBookWorld 2.6.17.14 #1 PREEMPT Fri Jan 18 10:40:25 GMT 2008 armv5tejl GNU/Linux

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ head -n2 /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor       : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 99.73

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ head -n2 /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:        30032 kB
MemFree:          4496 kB

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                2.8G  179M  2.5G   7% /
/dev/root             2.8G  179M  2.5G   7% /
/dev/md3              950M  151M  751M  17% /var
/dev/md4              914G  200M  913G   1% /shares/internal