Carrying debian in the keyring

I always carry a debian-live system in my keyring, it is an image (built by myself using a git repository) that I installed in a USB pendrive.

The device has three partitions. The first one contains the debian-live system itself, the second one is used for persistence and the third one is an extra fat16-formatted partition to copy and move files around easily. Here is the layout:

It is really handy to to be able to carry your operating system with you everywhere you go. You can boot it on almost any machine you have access to, saving your data in the pendrive. It is also a great tool to test hardware before performing an installation (the image includes an installer).

Using a raspi as a switch

Everybody is asking me why the heck I got a raspi. I proudly show it to all my family and friends and they all say:

 "What's this? What's this for?"

(I do not have the energy to explain them what a gopher server is, and why everbody should have, at least, one.)

I imagine that everyone has a different use for their raspis. I am having so much fun playing with it since I received it that I should write a post every single day. But unfortunately I do not have the time to do it :-(

Today I have yet found a new use for it, perhaps one of the best uses I could think of, even though I didn't have that idea in mind when I bought it.

I have a network server that I only use occasionally. I turn it on when I get home if I need it, but I always turn it off at night. One of the reasons to get my raspi was the possibility of having a machine connected 24/7 and also reachable through the internet, for example, using a smart phone.

Today, I was away from home with my netbook (eeepc 701) and I needed to start a build on my server. I thought it would be excellent if I could start the build before getting home and this way the first test would be done by the time I arrived home. Well, suddenly I got the idea:

I often turn the server on using 'wakeonlan', I have got several aliases to mount devices on my network and do other similar things. So using ssh from my eeepc I logged on to my shell account at sdf-eu, from there I connected to my raspi and installed the wakeonlan package (I didn't have it installed there yet) but I had my.shell_aliases in my $HOME. From there I turned on the server and opened a shell to start the build. When I got home the first build had failed and stopped, but it saved me a lot of time because when I arrived I could start another build right away.

I know that the idea is not the state of the art. Many IT guys do most of their work jumping from one server into the other all day long but I'm happy to have come up with such a nice trick: Using the raspi to turn on and off other machines in my network remotely. From now on my raspi will be one server to rule them all.

Here comes the squid

I have added a new machine to my personal collection. Its hostname is squid following my naming convention. See my Profile for more information.

It has a 64-bit processor (athlon), 2GB of ram and two hard disks. It is a little bit old but it is really fast. Today I installed debian wheezy with the b4 installer. Everything went fine and smoothly.

Welcome to my network, squid :-p

curlftpfs

Having a raspi on the network is a fantastic thing. It has so many possibilities that it seems endless. One of its constraints, however, is that it has not got a lot of available space. Well, it can have as much space as you can afford but big sd memory cards are expensive (or at least more expensive than the raspi itself) An sd card of 32 GB costs 39€, way more than the raspi itself.

Solutions:

1. Attach a pendrive (or several of them using a hub) to have a bit more spacehmm similar situation. This might be expensive and even ugly.
2. Mount a network drive as if it were a local storage device.

I chose option 2. I normally use sshfs to mount drives on my network or even remotely. I have an ftp-only drive that cannot be mounted using ssh. So I had to install curlftpfs. It is extremely easy to use.

1. Make sure your user belongs to the fuse group. If not:
   $ sudo adduser < user > fuse
2. Then make a mount point.
   $ mkdir -p ${HOME}/nas
3. Mount it.
   $ curlftpfs -o allow_other < user >:< password >@192.168.2.30 ${HOME}/nas

Nice huh?

To unmount it:

$ fusermount -u ${HOME}/nas

You can now either add the mount to fstab to make it permanent (not really necessary in my case since the raspi is up 24/7) or create an alias.

alias nasmount='curlftpfs -o allow_other < user >:< password >@192.168.2.30 $HOME/nas'

alias nasumount='fusermount -u ${HOME}/nas'

Now the best part of it. I mount the ftp server in my raspi but I also mount my raspi over ssh in my laptop so in the end I have my ftp server mounted in my laptop out of the box. Neat!!!