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My $33 linux box.

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feurig

in

The dorkbotPDX mailing list recently posted a link to a 25 dollar arm linux based nas called the PogoPlug. It was pink and ugly but it was $33 with shipping, so I bought one. It was stashed conspicuously under the rug by the nice people at UPS yesterday after I signed a slip saying they could leave it.

Using the thing was scary. I plugged it in but it didn’t show up anywhere. When I went to the pogo plug site they told me to download their software and when I did I was able to enable any disk that I plugged into it and then i could let it sync and share my personal files with some cloud thing in the wild blue yonder. This wasn’t done in any transparent and secure-able way but through a software wedge that made the thing show up as a drive locally. The scariest thing was that when I logged into the web site it was able to figure out where my device was (I assume because it was on the same lan as the computer I logged in from) reset the password and enable ssh on the weird looking box. Yeah it cut a hole into my lan.

There was only one thing to do with the scary pink beast. Name it Bradley and put another operating system on it.

So, after figuring out which particular pogo plug I had, I dug up a flash drive and followed the bouncing prompt from http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-provideov3 and less than an hour later I had a relatively usable linux box.

Now to figure out what to do with it.

 

 

Comments

4 responses to “My $33 linux box.”

  1. feurig Avatar
    feurig

    The PogoPlug software was still running. Fortunately it installs and runs within the /Applications/Pogoplug.app directory. Once you kill it you can drag the app into the trash and empty it.


    bragg:~ don$ ps -ef|grep ogo
    503 4673 596 0 0:00.49 ?? 0:00.70 /Applications/Pogoplug.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/PogoplugMonitor.app/Contents/MacOS/PogoplugMonitor -psn_0_1954269
    503 4678 4673 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 (pogoplugfs)
    503 4679 596 0 0:01.55 ?? 0:06.17 /Applications/Pogoplug.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/PogoplugRemoteAccess.app/Contents/MacOS/PogoplugRemoteAccess -psn_0_1966560
    503 4956 4673 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 (pogoplugfs)
    503 4958 4673 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 (pogoplugfs)
    503 4959 4673 0 0:00.00 ?? 0:00.00 (pogoplugfs)

    bragg:~ don$ killall PogoplugMonitor
    bragg:~ don$ killall PogoplugRemoteAccess

    Reply
    1. CH Avatar
      CH

      The pogoplug is a more commercial version of the sheeva/guru-plug. Incidentally, the seagate dockstar has very similar hardware. With things around like raspberry-pi, I wonder how these square up?

      In any case, I’ve got a router onto which I installed openwrt, and I’ve been able to attach a USB hdd to it. Not a NAS, really, but it means I can turn off the PC and leave overnight downloading to the router.

      Reply
  2. syd kahn Avatar
    syd kahn

    i alos got a pink pogoplug…

    Wouldn’t it be a great idea to use a low powered Linux box handle the arduino’s gateway to the wider world? I asked the IRC people and they promise me that the FTDI chip in the arduino is supported in their flavor of the Archllinux kernel… still have to figure out how to get it to work, but with the ability to have virtually unlimited storage for the arduino – what a steal. Now i can turn of my power hungry Windows box….

    Reply
    1. feurig Avatar
      feurig

      I was actually thinking about that except with the maple instead of the arduino.
      Either way it is much easier to go with one of the non-ftdi based arduinos like the duce/dorkboard, the tad, or the arduino uno and the arduino mega2561.
      Class compliant serial just works and could even be ported to a host mode micro board like the atmel usbkey.

      Reply

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