I wanted a silent weather server to run wviewweather on, to go with my new Davis Vantage Pro 2.

In view of the latest problems Vonage has been having (they are involved with litigation with Nortel, Sprint, Verizon and SunRocket), I decided to go somewhat farther afield to seek out an alternate solution.

To serve as both servers, I bought ($79 eBay) a tiny Cisco NSLU2 (known to the hacking community as the SLUG), a tiny little linux server (designed just to share USB HDDs), along with a 4 GB USB memory stick ($34 CompUSA). I’ll post details and instructions when I get it all working.

I modded the NSLU2 to run at 266 MHz (double it’s rated speed). I installed OpenSlug (now SlugOS) on the Slug.

Then I installed: Asterisk (open-source PBX) and wviewweather. I bought a Cisco PAP2-NA and Cisco 7960 (IP Phone) to connect to Asterisk.

Still working out the glitches, but boy have I learned a lot of LINUX in the last few days. Followup posts will go into gory details, but it’s been fun.

You can sort of track the reliability of the system as I get it up and working via checking out the weather systems I update with it: CWOP (for NOAA) and Weather Underground.

Since the Slug may not have enough horsepower to run all my phone conversations and the weather station, I have another one on order…. They’re a lot of fun to hack.