Pogoplug

Earlier this year I was interested in avoiding leaving my dual-core AMD media server on all the time, and stumbled on Pogoplugs, and the fact that they had been hacked,and that you could run linux on them. They are remarkably cheap being easily available for under £50.

The pogoplug is based on the original sheevaplug, and is a very low power (4W) arm device designed as a personal media sharing server, and has a 100Mb network port and 3 USB 2.0 sockets on the back, and one USB on the front face. Only downside is that it is pink (yes pink)!. It is also easily hackable, as there is just a tickbox on the original interface to turn ssh on, and the default password is easily available.

After some research I decided to install debian, as all my other linux kit is debian based. All links seemed to revert back to Jeff Doozan's site, which has excellent instructions on installing a base debian system on the pogoplug.

Once you've done that the next thing is to install the stuff on top.

I had originally intended to install mythtv, and use the device as a master backend and database server for Mythtv, just powering up the AMD box for recording and playback. This worked very well, but comments by Mythtv Devs that the box was probably not powerful enough to allow quick execution of the scheduling queries that Mythtv performs convinced me to have a rethink.

the Mythtv box now writes the wakeup time to the pogoplug when it shuts down, and the pogoplug uses wakeonlan to wake the mythtv box when required.

As the pogoplug is the always on server, it has been pressed into other uses:

• Web server
• Torrent server
• Home Automation server
• UPNP Media server
• Web based file storage

More on all of these in other posts...