Pogoplug home server project
I'm a frugal person. I admit it. I've been running a very old thinkpad laptop with Debian Linux in my basement with a salvaged hard drive in an inexpensive usb enclosure. That was my home file server. It was slow ( only USB v1.0 supported by the thinkpad ), and unreliable. The network connection kept dropping for some reason. Recently I saw that Buy.com had the Pogoplug on sale for $48. I subscribe to the Cheapskate rss feed in Google reader. I bought one and have been working to replace the old thinkpad's job with this cool little Linux device. 
The designed function of the Pogoplug isn't really what I wanted. Out of the box it's a private storage cloud device that works in conjunction with a web site ( my.pogoplug.com ). Once you plug your device into your own network, you can't do anything with it until you log onto the site and activate. From there, it makes your files available anywhere on the internet. Special software can then be downloaded to make your local device mount drives onto your local machines. I'd rather not rely on the web site, or let my data flow outside my network any more than is necessary, even if Pogoplug promises to encrypt it. So my mission was to disable all the built in features and install Free software to satisfy my own needs. I expect to find alternative firmware, like the DD-WRT that I use on my inexpensive Asus WL520GU router. Setting up the router was quite involved, but more than worth it. With the Pogoplug, what I found was less intrusive, but still time consuming. I went the safer route and use PlugApps. Specifically, the usb install option. I took a micro SD card and plugged it in to the Pogoplug using a tiny card reader device, similar to this one. Then following the instructions, I prepared the system to install the plugapps. Once complete, there's a large number of Free software packages that can be installed to the attached usb storage. The downside of my setup seems to be extremely slow write speed to the micro SD card. I mean glacially slow. I recently visited Glacier Bay, so I know what I'm talking about. Once I got the packages installed, the device runs at good speed. I needed primarily these packages: Samba (v3), Python, Rsync, Cron, and OpenSSH client. Pogoplug comes with an SSH server called Dropbear. I script some Amazon services with Python, so I installed the Boto package. Some of the time ipkg complained about mismatching md5 checksums. I'm hoping that doesn't mean the repository has been tampered with. I went ahead and downloaded the ipkg files and installed them anyway. This was the slowest phase of the project, just getting all the necessary files and unpacking them to the usb device. At this point I can declare success. The 2GB micro SD has about 200MB of additional software from plugapps, so I might try to find a smaller/faster usb drive and swap it in. I've attached my salvaged drive+enclosure and it's now available all over the house, but not on the internet. I modified the start up scripts to disable the packaged Pogoplug non-free software. All of my onsite and offsite backup scripts are scheduled and working, and I can rsync from anywhere over SSH. The device has been fast and reliable (full USB 2.0 speed, w00t!). It has 256MB of RAM which is plenty for my needs. The Pogoplug is a silent, low-power server that is perfect for a home network. The unfortunate thing is how crippled it is out of the box. There should be an "apps market" for this class of device, because almost everyone could benefit from a versatile low-power server device on their home network. Now I'm on the lookout for cheap USB hard drives to add to this thing and expand my backup practices to include more than the irreplaceable personal documents. The Pogoplug has 4 usb ports and I'm just using 2 of them so far.
The designed function of the Pogoplug isn't really what I wanted. Out of the box it's a private storage cloud device that works in conjunction with a web site ( my.pogoplug.com ). Once you plug your device into your own network, you can't do anything with it until you log onto the site and activate. From there, it makes your files available anywhere on the internet. Special software can then be downloaded to make your local device mount drives onto your local machines. I'd rather not rely on the web site, or let my data flow outside my network any more than is necessary, even if Pogoplug promises to encrypt it. So my mission was to disable all the built in features and install Free software to satisfy my own needs. I expect to find alternative firmware, like the DD-WRT that I use on my inexpensive Asus WL520GU router. Setting up the router was quite involved, but more than worth it. With the Pogoplug, what I found was less intrusive, but still time consuming. I went the safer route and use PlugApps. Specifically, the usb install option. I took a micro SD card and plugged it in to the Pogoplug using a tiny card reader device, similar to this one. Then following the instructions, I prepared the system to install the plugapps. Once complete, there's a large number of Free software packages that can be installed to the attached usb storage. The downside of my setup seems to be extremely slow write speed to the micro SD card. I mean glacially slow. I recently visited Glacier Bay, so I know what I'm talking about. Once I got the packages installed, the device runs at good speed. I needed primarily these packages: Samba (v3), Python, Rsync, Cron, and OpenSSH client. Pogoplug comes with an SSH server called Dropbear. I script some Amazon services with Python, so I installed the Boto package. Some of the time ipkg complained about mismatching md5 checksums. I'm hoping that doesn't mean the repository has been tampered with. I went ahead and downloaded the ipkg files and installed them anyway. This was the slowest phase of the project, just getting all the necessary files and unpacking them to the usb device. At this point I can declare success. The 2GB micro SD has about 200MB of additional software from plugapps, so I might try to find a smaller/faster usb drive and swap it in. I've attached my salvaged drive+enclosure and it's now available all over the house, but not on the internet. I modified the start up scripts to disable the packaged Pogoplug non-free software. All of my onsite and offsite backup scripts are scheduled and working, and I can rsync from anywhere over SSH. The device has been fast and reliable (full USB 2.0 speed, w00t!). It has 256MB of RAM which is plenty for my needs. The Pogoplug is a silent, low-power server that is perfect for a home network. The unfortunate thing is how crippled it is out of the box. There should be an "apps market" for this class of device, because almost everyone could benefit from a versatile low-power server device on their home network. Now I'm on the lookout for cheap USB hard drives to add to this thing and expand my backup practices to include more than the irreplaceable personal documents. The Pogoplug has 4 usb ports and I'm just using 2 of them so far.
