Time sink

Oh, wow - I think I just found my next time sink: the Linksys NSLU2, with Linux. I'd been planning on getting a Mac Mini or a mini-ITX PC to use as a dedicated web / mailserver machine, but now I want to use one of these instead! The NSLU2 is a little appliance made by Linksys which is intended to be a poor man's NAS - basically you plug one or two USB hard disks into it, then connect it to your router, and you get an SMB shared drive. Simple. Happily, though, it's massively hackable: you can put Linux on it, and it turns out to have an oomphy enough CPU to do quite a lot of stuff. I'm now imagining having two of these things - one to be my dedicated server, and one to use for its intended purpose, but with the Linux firmware so I can attach three or four drives and do RAID5. That one would store all my media and also act as a backup store for the other machines on the network. And all a lot cheaper than buying full-blown machines. This should be fun! Have to wait till next month before I can afford 'em, though - sigh...