Thursday, January 06, 2011

[Pogoplug] Hacking Pogoplug Gray version

Around 2 months ago, I got a Pogoplug gray version when BB had it on sale.

The exciting thing about this box is:
- It's linux based which means you can hack in it and add on packages you want.
- It's small, low noise, energy saving.

I've been looking for a low budget NAS for a long time. So the chance is here.

The software with this box provides online access and Windows/Mac/Linux drive driver. But it's not enough for me. I also need it to be able to download, and link to my WDTV as a media center. To modify this pogoplug into my ideal NAS, I searched online and read a lot articles about it. PlugApps is the most complete and successful one I found so far. Here is what I did.

First I installed PlugApps to a USB flash drive based on
OpenPogo:Installing Base Package - USB
and
How to Install (or remove) OpenPogo on Your Pogoplug-Attached USB Drive.

It provides additional features to the existing Pogoplug software by creating an opt folder on the USB drive that allows installation of Optware ipkg applications.

** Since Pogoplug disabled ssh by default, ssh must be enabled from the settings page of my.pogoplug.com before starting this installation.

What I used:
- I downloaded putty to my Asus EeePC (Windows XP) to SSH into pogoplug and execute all the commands;
- a 8GB Kingston USB flash drive formatted to ext2 attached to pogoplug.

When the basic stuff are in place, I added more packages such as: Samba (file sharing), Transmission(BT download), Lighttpd Web Server with PHP , MySQL and PHPMyAdmin ...

Then the most important part, install NFS server to share media to WDTV.

OK. That's it. I'll put more details in later posts.

1 comment:

kenyabob said...

Where did you find the walk through on how to hack the grey version? Seems like it went pretty smoothly! How much did you pay for it on sale?