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

[Phillip Kelchen <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I have the following files on my USB drive:

1. Firefox 1.5
2. NAV 10.0 (only use it when I fix an MU student's computer) 
3. Open Office 2.0
4. Spybot Search and Destroy 1.4
5. ZoneAlarm firewall setup
6. A backup of certain files on my computer

Since my computer doesn't boot from USB (too old), I have Ubuntu 5.10 and the 
latest DSL on live CD-ROMs. I also have Darik's Boot and Nuke floppy to 
securely erase hard drives, Windows XP Home and Professional CD-ROMs (for 
restore console), and DOS and Linux boot disks.

That's my tool kit- not quite as featured as most of yours, but it gets the 
job done. That and I have my chunky old laptop as a tool too...

Phillip


On Tuesday 03 January 2006 11:37, Nathan Odle wrote:
> 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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