What's on your Flash Drive?

From: NathanOdle
To: MLUG Members <members@mlug.missouri.edu>

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:

Boot the minimal Gentoo install CD, partition hard drive into boot,swap,root
Mount the system image off the DVD loopback-style and 'cp -a' everything over to new root partition
Chroot to the new root partition
Configure kernel for new hardware and 'make bzImage'
Copy image to /boot, configure GRUB
Configure /etc/conf.d/net and /etc/conf.d/hostname as necessary
Reboot! :)
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

-- NathanOdle

From: "Pottinger, Hardy J."

Main Tools:

GreatNews (news feed aggregator, keeps me from blogging my life away)
KeePass (passwords, credit card info, etc.)
KeyNote (lists, notes, brainstorming, research)
PSPad (quirky text editor, tons more features than my previous favorite, EditPlus, and it's free)
Portable Thunderbird (just for my personal address book, and send-only for my personal mail accounts, because sending personal mail from work is tacky)
ICEMirror (mainly for backing up the USB key, but can come in handy for other things)
PStart (puts all these tools a click away, and let's me script other things, like running an MP3 player with pre-selected tracks, or logging into the VPN)
SilentNight Micro Burner (tiny little CD/DVD burner app, takes up less than 1MB, portable, plenty of features)

Other Stuff:

SVN command line tools
PuTTY suite
WinSCP
WinMerge
Portable NVU (WYSIWYG HTML editor)
FPROT (antivirus, never know when you might need to clean up someone else's mess)
Foxit Reader (PDF reader, tiny, surprising full-featured) 1by1 (mp3 player)
Restoration (undelete)
TopStyle (CSS editor)
AutoRuns (more mess cleaning)

Installers:

7zip (winzip replacement)
Cisco VPN client (if I need to get some work done off campus)

Tons of ideas here:

Finally, this looks like fun, but I haven't had a chance to play yet:

http://nothickmanuals.info/doku.php?id=minivmac

FlashDriveKwikis