USB Bootable Linux + Dropbox FTW
Posted: March 24th, 2009 | Author: John Dill | Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: dropbox, OS, tech, ubuntu | 4 Comments »At work, we have shiny new laptops. Yeah! …. except that they’re locked down and audited. Lame. Even if I carry my laptop with me and use it off-hours, all my surfing and installations are still restricted and subject to company policy and review. Bummer.
Using the instructions at pendrivelinux.com, I quickly set up a persistent Ubuntu installation. It lives on my 8gig pico drive and just uses the laptop resources to run without writing anything to the laptop harddrive. It found all the drivers and was online and usable immediately after booting. It even has built-in drivers for my new Wacom tablet that works perfectly with GIMP. The default LiveCD setup is not secure, so I disabled the default no-login user and created my own account and added remote login and a few other customizations like auto-mounting to my home file server via SSH. Now, I can just put this tiny USB drive into any PC and boot into my own interface.
I went a step further to protect my browsing security and set up Squid proxy using my home Ubuntu server so that all my web traffic will be directly between my machines as far as any local firewall can tell. Using that, I can access anything that my personal server can access and do so without being restricted by local network blacklisting.
My latest addition to this setup was to use the Dropbox service to give me direct, local access to all my recent or frequently used files AND give me a persistent Firefox profile across all my machines (PC, Mac, and Ubuntu). That part is pretty cool. This synchronizes my plugins, cookies, passwords and sessions. I close Firefox at home, then I open it to the same tabs at work, preserving session logins.
Aight, I should either be doing homework or doing something about my geek addiction.
ha! i just bought the same wacom tablet two days ago. i’ll never go back to doing gimp with a mouse again.
nice work with tweaking the distro and setting up your profile and squid proxy. you’ve come a long way from surfing pr0n on an apple lc II, young padawan.
Hi,
I definitely agree with your saying! I believe that in order to really backup and encrypt your files you should also think of the consequences of others finding the external USB derive . The option to save data and control it anywhere is very simple now. The storage options are also various, but the comfort of using and carrying has no price…
I really should look into the security (or lack of) of my drive. My first thought is that the Linux user/pass authentication will keep anyone out, but I see it’s not that hard to mount the persistent image and just open my Firefox cache to read my passwords. hmm…..
google “linux encrypted partition”, get one set up and you should be ok.