[Lincs] Linux Apps that run from a USB drive

[J Taylor]

> I've been playing with my usb flash drive recently, installing portable
> Firefox (http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/) and
> thunderbird on it, plus an unzip and run apache/mysql/php setup
> (alright, it's w32 - but open source and very handy).
>
> Has anyone come across any linux based toys / utils that work especially
> well from USB thumb drives?  I'm looking at this from a sysadmin / data
> recovery / mini pen-test perspective, but any suggestions welcome.

Software running from usb can be painfully slow. So I get around this with
mine-

On my stick I keep a set of keys (for auto SSH logins) and a couple of
scripts as well as an mbox. The scripts fetch my mail from the server into
the mbox, and I can use whatever generic mbox reading program (mutt,
thunderbird) that is running on the system I'm logged into. I've also got
a copy of the script interpreter (cough php) executables (for both windows
and linux) in case that isn't installed on the system.

Most of my work is synchronised through the internet, and the flash stick
is just used to set up a "new" comptuer to work in line with the rest of
the systems, for example the current work I am doing is on a private CVS,
and the stick contains the relevant ssh key and scripts which synch with
both my database of which cvs and module pair contains which project
through a menu system, and then actually fetches that information. Other
scripts synchronise things like Firefox search functions and favorites.

The only "applications" I have on the stick are:

Putty, PSCP, Plink and Pagent (for those windows boxen I **have** to use)
a small PHP interpreter (small compile, not many libraries (also out of
date)) for both windows and linux

My problem with having software on the stick is that its very hard to keep
them uptodate with the systems in real life - all the debian linux
machiens I use are upgraded regually (weekly if not more often then that)
and the development work I am doing is done on lots of platforms with lots
of people, so using the memory stick to synchronise work would not be
effective either.

Of course when I come to a comptuer with no internet access, or in a
network where internet is heavily regulated and difficult to setup for a
temp user, then its not so bad because I can work with the last
checkout'ed copy of stuff on the stick and a simple editor (notepad or vim
depending what kind of system I'm on)

How do other people cope with updating software on a stick ? Which is
preferabble, system wide install (apt-get etc) or local user install of
applications?