My Thumbdrive

For a while now I've tried to get a balance of a really useful thumbdrive that I can carry around. I've found a solution which appears to be rather cool and multifaceted, so without further ado, let's dive in.

As the point of a thumbdrive is to be portable and run on whatever PC I happen to be sitting at, and give familiar tools, documents etc it has to be flexible. What I have is the combination of a live USB Linux distro and PortableApps, allowing me to boot into Linux if the PC allows it, or at least have some familiar apps like Firefox with my own settings, addons, bookmarks etc. All without having to install anything on the host PC. This is on a 4GB reasonably fast thumbdrive.

BackTrack 4 R1

BackTrack is a penetration testing and forensics distribution. I originally planed to use this as a teaching tool to learn the basics of network security and forensics on my own network to know what I am leaking and how easy my own network is to penetrate. It turns out to be a very nice live USB distro, which means I've ruled out my other hunt, the one for a regular USB distro as BackTrack does the job rather nicely.

It is KDE 3.5 and Fluxbox, neither of which I'm all that used to. I've been using XFCE for a while now that I'm slightly out of my comfort zone but that's all good. It's a good thing to stretch out once in a while to keep the skills fresh and experience what the others are doing and how they've improved since the last time you used them. Almost every other distro has moved onto KDE 4.x so 3.5 does feel a tad odd.

Having said that it boots very fast, is very responsive and has a LOAD of stuff installed right out of the box. It has easy menu options for turning on and off Apache, MySQL etc which suggests it'd make a pretty decent portable web development and demonstration platform too.

These guides will explain how to install BackTrack to various media in various setups. I used unetbootin without persistence to a thumbdrive, which is the same method as installing any live Linux distro to a thumbdrive.

The thumbdrive will need to be formatted with a filesystem Windows understands to be able to use PortableApps. I chose FAT32, although I guess NTFS should work too.

PortableApps

PortableApps is a wonderful little launcher which sits in the system tray and launches other portable apps or documents on your thumbdrive. It has a simple, portable documents folder and menu. When you put a thumbdrive with PortableApps installed the dialog window which opens asking you what you want to do with it will include "run PortableApps" as well as the usual "open this folder" "do nothing" etc.

You have a choice of the platform only, the suite light and the suite standard., the differences are in what comes pre-installed with it, what one is right for you is all down to what you want to use it for and what apps you need, a suite can be much quicker and easier to install. I chose the Platform Only. Select the location as the root of the thumbdrive so F: or G: wherever the thumbdrive is mounted. From that point on the portable versions of apps you get automatically know they are portable and will default to the right place.

My PortableApps

You can easily go crazy filling out the thumbdrive with lots of apps you'll never use. I try to keep this list down to what I realistically either use to could be called on to use.

• NotePad++ A great text editor with syntax highlighting and a whole lot more. It's very useful for css / php / html files.
• Inkscape A vector image editor I use at home too, which comes in handy for creating web buttons, headers etc.
• Gimp A great raster image editor which I use at home too. I've yet to really explore although I do know a few tricks.
• FileZilla The FTP client I use at home too for uploading modules, themes etc to my various Drupal test sites and my blog.
• Firefox My web browser of choice on all platforms in part because of the addons like NoScript, AdBlockPlus, CSLite, Web Developer, Firebug and in part because I'm just so used to it. There is a portable Chrome for those who prefer it.
• Thunderbird My email client of choice at home too.
• PChat A clone of XChat which I use at home for IRC. Having access to a channel full of experts while you're stuck on a problem can be a lifesaver. I tip my hat here to the good people at #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net.
• Foxit Reader For the odd occasion you need to read a PDF manual or guide.
• KeePass Since it's on a thumbdrive you want to keep your passwords secure.
• InfraRecorder A CD / DVD burner, it's a lot more functional than the built in Windows software.
• PeaZip A compression / decompression utility capable of handling .tar.gz files which Drupal uses, and Windows does not support natively.
• Toucan A multifunctional app for doing backups, syncing and encrypting.

You'll note that I don't have any downtime apps like video players, I try to spend as little time as possible in Windows, it's a time where I am trying to get something done, so audio and video playback are not on the agenda. Having said that there is a portable version of my favourite video player, SMPlayer which I may install for the odd teabreak moment.

That list is by no means exhaustive, it's just what PortableApps pull together. Another site which lists a whole lot more portable applications is PenDriveApps and it's sister site PenDriveLinux.

The Resume / CV Conundrum

I wanted to be able to carry around my CV so that I can email it as an attachment to a job application from any PC I'm sitting at but I also needed it to be 100% secure if my thumbdrive was stolen. Let's face it, a CV contains a lot of very private and useful information about us that we don't want just anyone to be able to read. It also needs to be an unencrypted PDF which is not password protected, after all if you email a potential employer and tell them "oh you need this password to open my CV" they're not going to bother even looking at it.

I looked at a few options such as DropBox where you could quickly pull the CV out from another PC and it'd sync it out of the thumbdrive, but it's still on DropBox's servers which I wasn't keen on. I did find a solution in Toucan.

Toucan has an encrypt / decrypt function where it applies the encrypt / decrypt command to everything inside the folders you specify, and asks you for a password to start the process. It changes the files to .cpf so My_CV.pdf would become My_CV.pdf.cpf. This means the files themselves are still visible but they're complete gibberish without the password to decrypt them. Simply open Toucan, select the folder your CV (or any other document you want to use this for) enter your password when prompted, and decrypt them. They'll magically return to the original filename My_CV.pdf and be unencrypted, ready to be attached to an email.

I have a template email set up in Thunderbird for job applications too which I start from and modify to personalise it to the company in question. That way I don't have to try and plan my thoughts out on the spur of the moment. Running Thunderbird from the thumbdrive also allows me to send from my non-webmail email address without leaving any trace of my password in the cache, history etc of someone's browser. This comes in specially handy where the PC you're sitting at is owned by someone who still sees Microsoft as the best in class and therefore won't use anything except IE.

Toucan is manual in this process so you'll have to get into the habit of remembering to encrypt again when you're finished. It's a simple process but pointless if the day you forget to do it is the day you leave your thumbdrive on the train.

Final Thoughts

There are of course a million ways to do these types of things for a million different uses and personal choices. I found this to be easy to setup and most of all, practical, which is the whole point of carrying about your toolkit in a single USB thumbdrive. Before I was playing with carrying two thumbdrives, one with Puppy Linux and another with PortableApps. As cool as it is, I was never really happy with Puppy Linux and it meant carrying two drives and switching them about etc.

If you only need either a decent live USB Linux distro or a PortableApps setup, a 2GB thumbdrive will be fine. BackTrack does install on a 2GB drive, although it won't have much breathing space. And PortableApps comes down to what apps you have installed. A 4Gb+ thumbdrive allows a two-in-one solution.

So how do you set up your portable thumbdrive toolkit? Suggestions?