pogoplug network attached storage (NAS) for linux, mac, windows

A couple months ago I bought a PogoPlug. Because it's an ungodly pink colour and because I've been hella busy with other stuff, I finally unboxed it today, and discovered that while:

• it's a snap to configure through the web UI
• it works with ext3 and fat32 drives
• it's SSH accessible, and
• there are other installable linux apps for it

... setting it up for Linux was not entirely trivial.

While the above article helped, a couple points were not immediately obvious:

• If you mount the drive as root, it's not accessible as anyone else; if you mount as the user, not even root can read it.
• Use of a /etc/pogoplugfs.conf file is highly recommended, so that you can log in w/o having to key in your username and password every time. Create this file as root, and set it chmod 644 if not already:

  svcuser=you@email-provider.com
  svcpassword=web-login-password
  logseverity=10

• To automount the drive on startup (eg., on my old xubuntu 6 system), as root, try creating a new file, /etc/init.d/pogoplug:

  #! /bin/sh
  ### BEGIN INIT INFO
  # Provides:          
  # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
  # Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
  # Should-Start:      $named
  # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
  # Default-Stop:      1
  # Short-Description: pogoplug fs mount as myusername
  # Description:       pogoplug fs mount as myusername
  ### END INIT INFO
  
  sudo -u myusername /usr/bin/pogoplugfs --mountpoint /media/pogoplug
  
  exit 0

• Then, to activate this file, as root:

  chmod +x /etc/init.d/pogoplug; \
  for x in 2 3 4 5; do \
    cd /etc/rc${x}.d; ln -s /etc/init.d/pogoplug S99pogoplug; \
  done

With Fedora 12, I could simply create a startup task using System < Preferences < Startup Applications from the gnome menu.