Playing With the Pogoplug

I purchased a Pogoplug device last week. I have been playing with it for a couple of days. Being a tinkerer, I kept it in it’s out of the box configuration for nearly an hour. I unboxed it (sorry, no unboxing video, although it is packaged quite nicely), plugged it into my router, power, and a spare USB drive sitting on my desk. I logged into my.pogoplug.com, created a username/password and it found my pogoplug and I was able to access the drive and it’s files from my browser. I was expecting to be able to see a mountable drive like a typical NAS device like the Linksys NSLU2 device. But, the Pogoplug requires downloading client software to be able to mount the drives. Not a big deal, but it limits it usefulness in some ways.

But, there is a way to make the Pogoplug play other roles in your home IT infrastructure. OpenPogo is the place to stop to unleash your Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is a small Linux server running a very small OS configuration. It resides on a small partition in flash memory. There is a larger, unused partition on the flash memory. Following the instructions I have made my Pogoplug a bit torrent client, a TOR server, a media server, and a DynDNS update client. I can now offload bit torrent downloads to the Pogoplug, share my iTunes library, and access it by a domain name rather than IP address.

There have been a few hitches, nothing worth describing. It took a little work to set up the Transmission client daemon to add enough security to allow access from outside of my network. The TOR server setup was pretty quick and seems to work well. Firefly install and setup was very quick and seems to work great. There is a danger of overtaxing the small server with too many torrent downloads.

If you have some basic Linux skills and can manage to use Google, there is a lot you can do with this unit. I’m just getting started.

UPDATE: OpenPogo is giving away a Pogoplug go here: http://openpogo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=212. Or follow them on Twitter, @openpogo for more info.