The NSLU2 causing trouble recently...
We've had two serious bugs on the NSLU2 recently that both caused the system not too boot anymore. The first one was related to initramfs-tools. Kevin Price reported that after upgrading to initramfs-tools 0.92 the system would hang during boot waiting for the root filesystem. When I booted my NSLU2 and looked at the output, I noticed that no root device was set. When I mentioned this to maks, the maintainer of the initramfs-tools package, he immediately knew what was wrong and uploaded a fix. On the NSLU2, the boot loader doesn't pass a root device to the kernel so we set one in the initramfs itself. The code that loads this config variable is not used by many devices so nobody noticed that this got broken in 0.92 until the package moved to testing.
The second problem, reported on Saturday by Paul Collins and diagnosed today with some help from Kevin Price is also related to the strange way the NSLU2 boots. The NSLU2 has 6 MB available for the ramdisk but due to a bug in APEX (the second stage loader used on the NSLU2 by Debian) only 4 MB are actually used. When you write a ramdisk that is larger than 4 MB but smaller than 6 MB, flash-kernel will happily write the full image, but APEX will only tell the kernel about the first 4 MB. As it turns out, everything works fine on arm with 2.6.25, but on armel some additional SCSI modules are enabled that result in the ramdisk becoming too large. The short term solution is to disable these modules, but really APEX should finally be fixed (patches have been available for quite a while thanks to Gordon Farquharson). Fortunately 2.6.25 hasn't moved to testing yet and this problem only occurs on armel, so few people were impacted.
The nice thing about the NSLU2 is that you can write a new flash image via the network, so you can flash a good image in case your machine no longer boots. Nevertheless, we have to make sure such serious bugs don't occur in the future or that they are at least caught very early. Special thanks go to testers like Kevin Price.
QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 experimental developer release
Yesterday I completed the first successful installation of Debian on a QNAP TS-209 using a custom debian-installer image with 2.6.25 from unstable. I made the installer image for QNAP TS-109 and TS-209 available as an experimental developer release and today I also uploaded images for the TS-409. More on my plans to support the QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 in the upcoming release of Debian (starting with beta3 of debian-installer) soon.