[MLUG] What's on your USB Flash Drive?

[Nathan Odle <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

My response to Christian regarding SSH clients made me start thinking 
about what I keep with me on the ol' USB flash drive.  How about we all 
share and maybe we can get some good ideas from one another?  This list 
is based just on my personal experience, but as Shawn already pointed 
out to me today with his suggestion of WinSCP, I'm sure there's a lot of 
room for improvement.  Also, I say "USB flash drive" but most of this 
stuff (except the live VMWare image) could easily go on a DVD-R as 
well...just requires re-burning every time you update it.

OS:
- Gentoo 2005.1 Minimal Install ISO image (59 MB)
- Windows XP Professional SP2 ISO image (654 MB)

Applications:
- Office XP Professional ISO image (472 MB)
- Adobe Reader (20 MB)

Internet
- Firefox (5 MB)
- Thunderbird (6 MB)
- PuTTY (0.5 MB)
- MindTerm (1.4 MB)
- WinSCP (1.2 MB)
- Filezilla (3 MB)
- Trillian (9 MB)

Utilities:
- Hiren's BootCD ISO image (includes Ghost, Partition Magic, etc. etc. 
etc.)  (48 MB)
- Daemon Tools  (0.5 MB)
- UltraISO (2.6 MB)
- Nero Burning ROM (33 MB)
- Diskeeper Pro (21 MB)
- Belarc Advisor (0.8 MB)
- CCleaner (0.5 MB)
- Lavasoft Ad-Aware (2.5 MB)
- MS AntiSpyware (6.5 MB)
- AVG Antivirus (5 MB)
- Panda Platinum Internet Security 2006 (50 MB)
- F-Prot Antivirus (10 MB)
- SyncBack (5 MB)

Other:
- VMWare Workstation 5 (57 MB plus 1GB Windows 2000 Professional image)

Drivers/Firmware:
- Latest Intel chipset drivers (3 MB)
- Latest nVidia ForceWare drivers (21 MB)
- Latest ATI Catalyst drivers (12 MB)
- Latest SveaSoft firmware for various Linksys wireless routers (~10 MB)

This all amounts to about 2.5 GB.  A lot of this software is free (as in 
beer), but some of it has been worth paying for (VMWare, Nero, etc.).  
Also, lots of the really good stuff is actually pretty small (and 
free).  For example, Daemon Tools is an absolute lifesaver as it allows 
you to mount ISO images to a virtual drive - no burning required - but 
it's only half a megabyte in size. Belarc Advisor allows you to pull a 
system's entire configuration plus see what service packs/hotfixes 
you're missing...at only 800kb in size.  CCleaner can do wonders for an 
encrusted Windows installation - just 500kb.

The "MVP" of that whole list though, has to be Hiren's Boot CD.  If 
things get really rough, it's great to have on hand:  
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

I also sync a directory on my USB flash drive with all my work stuff 
every night before I leave work both for data safety and convenience in 
case I want to work on something at home.  SyncBack is great for doing 
so, and the whole process takes maybe 45 seconds depending on how much 
work I've done that day.


<slightly OT>
In addition to the USB flash drive, I also try to keep handy a DVD with 
a binary image of a basic Gentoo i686 installation.  With about 15 
minutes of boot CD magic I can do a Gentoo install on any system.  
Basically, this consists of the following:

1.  Boot the minimal Gentoo install CD, partition hard drive into 
boot,swap,root
2.  Mount the system image off the DVD loopback-style and 'cp -a' 
everything over to new root partition
3.  Chroot to the new root partition
4.  Configure kernel for new hardware and 'make bzImage'
5.  Copy image to /boot, configure GRUB
6.  Configure /etc/conf.d/net and /etc/conf.d/hostname as necessary
7.  Reboot! :)
8.  When convenient, 'emerge --update -v world'

I've never had an installation of this type fail, and it saves a *TON* 
of time installing a new Gentoo system.  I've also got more 
sophisticated images I keep on a removable hard drive:  e-mail/web 
server, workstation, SAMBA server, Asterisk server.  I can plop any of 
these images down on i686-compatible hardware and be good to go.  The 
only thing I'd like to figure out is a way to do loopback + 
compression...'dd' images are the size of the partition they're made 
from, so it'd be nice to shrink them down and not be storing bits full 
of empty space.  Maybe someone has a good suggestion for a way to do 
this other than bzipping the image and having to unbzip it every time 
you use it?  It'd be nice to have something like:
'mount -o loop,*compressed* /mnt/cdrom/gentoo.img /mnt/install'

-N


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