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So I’ve done a couple of articles about my new filesharing appliance the PogoPlug over the last year. Absolutely fantastic device, use it often remotely.

One thing that I’ve been unable to get working so far was the native OS application. The application allows you to map a drive directly to the drives connected to the appliance, hence the last article about installing a samba server on it. This issue probably won’t apply to most folks, my home network is a little unique compared to the average person buying a commercial router from Linksys, Belkin or the like. Skip to the bottom for the commands if you’re not interested in my reasons for splitting the networks.

So, I have two completely separate networks at the house. One is wired, and the other is wireless, they interconnect through some various switches but ultimately demarc on an IPCop firewall. The wired network is where my home servers and toys connect (SlingBox, ssh server, pogoplug) whereas the wireless is mostly computers or smartdevices.

With this setup, I don’t have any want or need to proxy traffic from the wired network as they’re essentially all services. From the wireless where we actually surf however, I like to run URLFiler and Advanced Proxy on the IPCop box to get filter out ad servers and malicious and adult websites. The problem with doing this is that the clients need an UNFILTERED direct connection to both the PogoPlug device and the main PogoPlug server out in internet land. Until today I mostly used the samba share to get around this, but it started bothering me and after some poking around I came up with a very easy solution.

You may be asking, why not just add an exception in squid? Well, it doesn’t seem to work through the IPCop interface. And modifying the actual config files would do the job, but the next time IPCop restarts or I add something in the web interface, it would wipe out the manual changes I made. So, lets fall back to good old iptables and prerouting!

By adding these two rules, we save a whole lot of headaches, and the software works perfectly:

The first line allows an unfiltered connection to sercvice.pogoplug.com which

I know there are a bunch of articles online about installing samba on Pogoplug (or openpogo enabled) devices. I read quite a few of them and still ran into trouble installing it on my appliance so I though I’d do a quick write-up of how I got things rolling.

First, you need to install the OpenPogo base package. Very detailed and effective directions are available here.  A couple of notes about OpenPogo before you go running off though. First, it requires an external USB drive to install on, and run from. Second, if you remove the USB drive (perhaps mistakenly thinking you were done with it) the filesystem that was on there is dismounted and everything running from it stops. And finally, the USB stick will have to be reformatted into a linux ext2 or ext3 format which means you’ll lose any existing data on it. Best to find an older 1GB stick and use that for this as the packages seem rather small.

Ok, so once you’ve installed the OpenPogo software onto your external USB drive, rebooted, mounted, etc, what you’ll need to do is run ipkg to install Samba. You should be able to execute this command to kick it off:

This kicks off the download and installation process which I imagine under ideal circumstances should take care of the whole thing for you. If it did, skip this section and see the configuration part below. I’ll warn you though, the downloads were very slow for me, took about twenty minutes to download the seven meg file even though I was able to wget it to my linux box much faster.

The problem I had was an invalid MD5 checksum when using the automatic installer, so I resorted to manually downloading the file, then installing it.

Once the install has completed successfully, you should turn on the server by running this command:

After which you can verify that the server is running by checking the output of netstat

.....Continue reading Installing Samba on your pogoplug

After reading some reviews on Engadget and Gizmodo I broke down and purchased a PogoPlug from buy.com (they were on special for $47.99 at the time, $79 at the time of this writing).

Pogoplug is an appliance that you can connect to your home network which runs a custom version of linux. The device has a gigabit ethernet port, three USB 2.0 ports on the back and one on the front. Basically, you plug your external USB hard-drives into this thing and it makes your files available to you no matter where you roam.

Best part (for home users) is that there are no firewall rules that need to be put on your home router or custom firewall. The device heartbeats out to their servers in the cloud and make the whole thing possible without a lick of configuration being required. Caveat: UDP has to be unfiltered outbound for this to work, so “real” firewalls may have to have allow statements put in them.

So, with your purchase of the hardware, you get lifetime support and access to your personal “storage in the cloud”. This can be accomplished remotely (or locally) via the web client or samba/windows shares. You also have the option to share files and folders with the world, individual users, etc. There’s even a client that runs on the Mac, PC and iPhone to access files directly and see them as locally mounted drives. If you happen to be on the same network your connections go directly to the device and not through the Pogoplug servers.

From my iPhone, I’ve been able to stream movies over WiFI and 3G with great quality. The Pogoplug device will convert audio and video files on the fly to allow streaming to the iPhone/iPod/iPad/PC/Mac, etc. Sweet little deal, if you happen to have a bunch of movies or music on your external drive(s).

Through the use of OpenPogo you can even install custom software on the appliance like samba, squid, bittorrent, a webserver, etc! Since this little guy runs on linux, the possibilities are endless really.

Been using this for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really impressed. The company announced just a few days ago that a new firmware update would allow for printing through the