Pogoplug SAN using AoE

pogoplugThe Pogoplug E02 is a Linux-capable embedded computer with gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity. It can be found quite cheap (US$35 or so) on the secondary market. As it was originally sold as a storage appliance for home users, it ships with somewhat inflexible factory firmware. However, it is reasonably easy to replace the bootloader with one which can boot an arbitrary Linux distribution.

Once I got my Pogoplug running Debian, it was surprisingly easy to set it up as network storage using ATA-over-Ethernet. Details after the jump.

Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS: Recovering from a Broken libc

Note: Reasonably heavy UNIX-geekery ahead. Mostly Linux-specific, somewhat Debian-specific and a little bit Ubuntu-specific. Skip if that isn’t your cup of ichor.

I recently did something incredibly ill-considered while logged in (as root, natch) to my Ubuntu server box at home. In essence, I told the package manager to uninstall libc.

On a scale from good to bad, this is bad.

Now, I could have booted up from a rescue disk and fixed it. I could have re-installed easily enough (using the trick where you just keep your existing partitions and don’t format them — though this would have inevitably led to some fallout as various config files and customizations got clobbered). Heck, I even had a reasonably recent backup at hand. None of these sounded especially fun, mostly because the machine was in a place where it’s a hassle to stick a head on it. I had three things working in my favor: an open root-privileged shell prompt, Internet connectivity and my native cunning.

Read on after the jump for the full tale.

Linux on Zipit: Debian

This is a followup to my original article about using a general-purpose Linux distro on the Zipit Z2 messenger. In this post, I’ll discuss my experience installing Debian (specifically, Emdebian Grip) on the Zipit. This is a significant improvement over the previous process, as it means you can automatically upgrade and install new packages from an extensive repository of pre-compiled software. You can just “apt-get install whatever” instead of having to create a cross-development environment and compile everything yourself. Details after the jump.