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What's on Your USB Pen Drive?
gmhowell asks: "With the popularity of USB pen drives, I've thought it time to join the crowd and get one. But I'm curious as to what is so important that you should always have a copy. Clearly PuTTY or your favorite SSH client is important. Perhaps with some keys. But what else? A copy of your browser cookies? MP3s? Pictures? What other software is smart enough to run from a portable medium without need for an installation? (Yup, MAME and z26 seem like likely candidates)."
LINUX!
Has anyone found a decent Linux distribution, which fits in 32 Mb (i.e. any smartdisk)? By decent I mean, a desktop distro, with say KDE or Gnome, and all your basic tools. It also would be useful if it could boot directly from windoze or DOS (loadlin?) as well as boot from the smartdisk (is this possible?).
I know there's knoppix out there, but you need to repackage it. Has anyone done this (and keeps the distro up to date?)
My Stack Overflow user
Are on mine: Damnation and a Day Album.
And a few PGP keys.
Nice.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
Well, if I had one, it'd be more for "I need to get data from here to there" than for "I need to store data in my pocket." Right now I have little 2.5" CD-RWs I use for getting drivers etc around the office. This'd be faster I think.
"Derp de derp."
These things are porn stashs for married men.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
You can actually BOOT linux from windows... LOADLIN.EXE does that... I'm not a troll, get your facts straight, sweetie! ;-)
My Stack Overflow user
My entire UNIX account from school, including all my read mail and web pages, is backed up on my USB drive. I store anything I think I might need to work on just in case I don't have internet access.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
i used to have a cygwin install on my keychain, but it requires some registry crap in windows to work properly.
rather than clutter up the registry of every windows computer i'll ever use (joke here), i use unxutils, which has a great command line interface. along with cli gpg and my ssh keys, my usb keychain is of great use to me when i'm away from my powerbook.
I used to use Password Safe at work so that I could have randomized passwords and a system to retrieve them from, but it was very inconvenient because I wouldn't have the changes I made at home.
I now store my password safe database on my pen drive and just plug it into a USB slot when I need it--since I'm one of those geeks with a keychain equivalent to George's Wallet (Seinfeld)--it's always with me wherever I am.
I also store various utilities that I use from day-to-day, and made it bootable so that I can boot from it on ailing workstations when I need to.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
I'm a college student, so I'd probably keep a few small games on there to bide the time in computer labs, copies of papers and programs I had to write in case I forgot the hardcopy and needed to print it out again, and probably some PGP keys and a favorites list.
> A copy of your browser cookies?
Cookies? Please. Try _bookmarks_. Definitely.
One's preferred text editor. Compression tools (zip, bzip2, etc.).
Perhaps some critical files for 'off-site' backups: your resume, a copy of your network settings, your address book, etc. The garbage file you snagged from that Gibson.
A network tool or tool(s), a virus scanner. Disk partitioning tools (PartitionMagic if you're a Windows user). A copy of your favourite games (BZFlag, GLTron).
Make this thing bootable, too, just in case, as some machines can boot off these things now. Yay!
I love it - I bought a 128MB and it is just about perfect. I carry it around like a pocket knife :)
I got my dad to buy one to backup his files while hes on the road. And I just had to have one after setting his up for him and such. If you DONT have one - go get one, really...
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
while my 'net connection has been down, i've been using it exclusively to move data back and forth between my work computer and my home machine.
:)
works well that way.
but i made a mistake and lost 8MB of my 32MB key to a bad tool. anyone know of a way to repartition my key to reclaim all 32MB? (my options are open.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
The stuff I work on (texts, source code, ...) checked out from my CVS repository. CVS lets me sync changes between the files on my USB memory and the various computers I use. Pretty nice side-effect of a version control tool.
I also reserve about 30MB for a FAT partition; file transfers between work and my connectionless old HP Vectra.
Here's what I store on mine.
1. Important documents. Mostly my poetry and fiction writing.
2. Funny little pictures I find on the net. I might want to show them to someone.
3. My irc software (mirc, in this case)
4. My Firebird and Thunderbird profiles. Finally, roaming profiles!
5. Copies of Firebird and Thunderbird. (so if I'm on a dialup computer, it doesn't take me very long to get up and running.
6. Backups of important files from both home and work. Just in case I lose the original, or need that file.
Very useful things, for the roaming profile alone.
Of course then the cover (the plastic part with the hole that you use to put it on a keyring, which probably costs about 40 cents wholesale) broke and now I can't even find the damn thing.
- adam
Personal: papers and documents going back to 1988, books im reading, picutres of friends, family, neekid strangers, my internet links, resumes,documents, interesitng web pages, i use it as my main storagefor personal stuff, and back it up often.
Work: Its fantastic for transferring/working with hughe documents and mailing lists the you dont want to put up on the network, also its fantastic for transferring peoples slightly outsized power point presentations and whatnot from their laptops, to the computer of the person theyre workig with, especially when its a personal laptop with no way of connecting to the netowrk.
Essentially, i use it for anything that wont fit on a floppy, or anything i want to have with me on a moments notice. I think theyre the greatist thing since sliced bread.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If you've got a key you tend to use from only one place (i.e. work->home), consider prefixing the authorized_hosts line with a from="some.hostname.com" as well. This will prevent the key being used from a different IP by someone who "borrows" your keychain.
Puppy linux fits in 48MB w/ a X windows interface and office software
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
Mesh-AP fits in 32MB and incorporates an ad-hoc WiFi mesh and an Opera browser
http://www.locustworld.com/
Trinux fits in a floppy with heavy duty security functions
http://www.trinux.org/
So, here's what my pendrive looks like after 10 months of use:
/docs - all my personal docs (bookmarks, resume, will, keyfiles, etc)
:(
/docs directory in case I'm on a foreign box.
/proj - source checkouts for personal projects under active development. Dedicated Eclipse workbench and tailored shortcut for launching eclipse. This lets me have one ide for java, python, documentation, websites, xml/xsl, etc.
/xfer - file transfer/holding area for moving stuff between locations/systems
/linux - aliases, scripts, must have utils
/win32 - gvim, dedicated profiles for thunderbird and firebird. Installs (but not installed) for putty, winzip, firebird (instant browser!)
Note, Putty is registry dependent, and the workaround for using it on a pen drive is too painful for everyday use. I love Putty, but it doesn't live on my pen drive. I wish it would
Having firebird and thunderbird profiles on the pen drive means that I can have firebird/tbird installs live on work/home/laptop machines but always keep my data off the boxes and in my hands. I keep my bookmarks in my
is on my pen drive. Which I don't have. But if I did. It would be porn.
Now wash your hands.
I won a 64mb USB thumbdrive while at the last AZSAGE meeting. I didn't know what I would do with it at first, but it quickly became the most essential part of my keychain. The first thing I put on it was TightVNC and Putty. That alone seemed like it would make the thing pretty handy. Then I went to tinyapps.org and grabbed a ton of useful stuff including...
1) compression tools
2) encryption tools
3) a few graphic tools
4) secure file deletion tools
5) tiny web server
6) tiny ftp server
7) tiny irc server
8) tiny irc client
9) tiny personal firewall
10) hex editor
11) unix commands for DOS
12) misc other stuff
After all that I still had 44mb to work with. I threw all the scripts I'd written, a few priceless pics, a couple mp3s, and I still have 30mb to go.
Choose you future. Choose to sysadmin.
My Windows XP EFS keys (hey, if any of you are using encyrpting file system on Windows, make sure that you export the keys and store them somewhere. Because if you can't get windows to boot for some reason, even if you know your password and have access to the hard drive, there's no supported way to decrypt the files without having previously exported the keys.)
and PGP key.
Small files I'd be really upset to lose, like midi or tablature for a bunch of songs I wrote.
And a whole bunch of MP3s, since my drive is also an MP3 player!
The thing is, anywhere you'd care to use putty, it's probably easier to just download it from the internet, since it's just one file. (Maybe it would be sensible to store some "offline" apps on it, but I don't have any I care for..)
See:
- automount
- hotplug architecture
- kde3 has nice option to put new mounted filesystems on desktop as icons, see prefs.
Trillian can run from portable media (even a CD if you're not interested in changing settings). Gotta modify some ini's to make the paths relative, but it works pretty well.
Somebody even set up a website with step-by-step instructions
Trillian Anywhere
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.
Portable system that will go anywhere.
Boot off the knoppix cd and mount the home dir on the usb drive.
This is the way to go, and you can have all the software you should need.
I'm on my 2nd pen drive now. I sold my first one, a 128 MB Lexar in order to get a 256 MB one. I put mine on my keychain. Since then I've dropped my keys on the road several times, taken naps with them in my pocket, and who knows whatever else with them. So far I have not had so much as a hiccup out of either one of them.
"Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee." --Bender