Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Space, The Final Frontier

Last night, I gave my Dell netbook a terabyte drive.

A few weeks ago, Scott Mann talked me into buying a Pogoplug, an embedded-Linux device, about the size of my palm, with an ethernet port and four USB ports to hang external disks off of. Plug it in, plug in a drive (or four), and you're done: no muss, no fuss. Kristina gave me a terabyte drive for Christmas, so they're now up and running in one corner of a bookshelf.

Unfortunately, it's built to serve disks up through a web interface, so each byte goes out the door, off to their servers in San Jose or Boca Raton or Minneapolis or wherever they are, and back down to whereever it's wanted.

But wait! It's a Linux box.

The OpenPogo community has a repository of downloadable packages that you can use to customize it in a variety of ways. (It's a Debian-based distro, and the package manager is ipkg.) I turned it into an NFS server by installing unfs3, exported the disk, and it was instantly visible locally.

On my netbook, I then installed an automounter, autofs, and -- ta-daa! -- now the disk's there whenever I look at it.

Space. The final frontier. [ Cue Star Trek theme. ]

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