What's On Your Thumbdrive?

Broue Master asks: "Nowadays, we need to support not only people at the office, but friends, family, friends of the family, family of the friends... you name it! They all run Windows to a degree and there are many tools to help you when assisting. Personally, I have a thumb-drive with removable memory cards. One of them has a small bootable Linux, the other one is filled with ready to use Windows utilities (CPU-Z, Ultra-Edit32), DOS utilities I've been collecting over the years, and Unix-style utilities (ps.exe, kill.exe, and others) ported to Windows, without the need for a layer like Cygwin. I also have a copy of the install files for AVG, Spybot, Sygate and the likes. But, even though I think I have many great tools, I'm sure I do not know about a lot of great others to help diagnose and solve problem. So I ask you, what's on your thumb-drive?"

For those who know what I'm talking about...

[ModernGeek]

....we need an open source equivalent to the GeekSquad MRI :)

A few win32 apps on my drive

[(H)elix1]

are Putty (ssh client and proxy pipe), PSCP (secure copy of files from *nix to/from win), PSFTP (secure ftp), tail, and scite (a nice text editor).

Easy to bring it all....

[McShaken]

With the 2GB drives costing so little, it's easy to bring all the tools you need anywhere you go. Some of the basics - All the tools from SysInternals - About 27MB (including RegMon, FileMon, etc...) File Recovery software like Restore File shredding utility SpyBot/Adaware TweakUI SynchBack (Synch and file backup program) AVG - AntiVirus Folder with key XP system files CCleaner Opera/Firefox/Thunderbird

Quick list

[Denyer]

Some of this is a bit redundant, but it is all only 19Mb using UPX.

1by1 (play MP3s), AriskKey (recover passwords), AutoRuns (enumerate startup tasks), BurnCDCC (burn ISO images), CD (basic CD player), CDex (rip CDs + convert MP3/WAV), Copier (quick scan + print), CWShredder (clean spyware), DComBob (tame DCOM), Discover (force windows onscreen), DupeLocater (find and clean), FileRecovery PC Inspector (undelete), Folder2ISO (make ISO images), FoxitReader (read PDFs), GUIPDFTK (split/join PDFs), HijackThis (find spyware), HJSplit (split/join files), Identify_Boards (identify hardware), IPAgent (show IP), KatMouse installer (due to MS drivers), LCISOCreator (make ISO image from CD), Leaktest (test firewall), Microsoft keygen (people lose things), MultiRes (change res + force refresh), Multi Timer (stopwatch), NoteTab Light (text editor), NTest (test monitor setup), OnTop (pin windows to foreground), Process Explorer (task manager), ProduKey (recover passwords), Registry Commander (virus cleanup), ResHacker (examine executables), Rootkit Revealer (just in case), ShootTheMessenger (turn service off), Shred by AnalogX (simple filer shredder), TedNPad (unicode text editor), TFT (dead pixel locator), UNPnP (tame SSDP), UPX (compress executables), UnitConverter (what it says), utorrent (basic torrent app), VCdControlTool (mount ISO images), Windows 98 generic USB flash driver, WinImp (archive to ZIP, de-archives more), WinIPs (set hardware IPs), Wizmo (create force kill shortcuts), WNTIPCFG (show IP config), WS_FTP95 (basic FTP client), XnView (image browser and effects), XPDite (minor XP-SP1 fix), YACalc (evaluate expressions), XVI32 (hex editor)

Re:The most important

[Mostly a lurker]

Funnily enough, while I use Firefox myself for the extensions, when switching standard users I am now giving them Opera 9. Firefox is getting targeted by malware, and I think Opera 9 is actually intrinsically more secure also.

The information needed to rebuild my life

[Just Some Guy]

An Electronic Survival Kit [honeypot.net]. If there's one thing Katrina taught me, it's that losing your entire life would completely suck. Why not take a few minutes now so that you can get back to normal ASAP?

Re:Here are two excellent resources...

[Mooga]

PortableApps.com has tons of great stuff. I use Portable Firefox all the time when I'm on the run and can't use my own laptop.

I've also been crazy enought to run Steam on one of my 1 gig thumb drives. Simply install Steam and the games of your choice localy (I did it with Half-Life and TFC). Then copy the whole Steam folder to your thumb drive. While updates take a long time, booting the game and downloading new maps isn't nearly as bad as you would think. Lag was minimal when I tested.

I just burn it to a CD

[toddestan]

Sadly, it still seems that a good portion of the time someone asks me to look at some computer, the computer is an old Windows 95 or 98 box that lacks working USB ports. Atleast it's finally gotten to the point where I can pretty much count on the computer having a CD drive (though I do have issues with slow, fussy, dust-clogged 8 year old CD readers having problems reading my burned CDs) I do have USB thumbdrives, but I mostly use those as a big floppy to move data around between computers, rather than semi-permanent storage of Linux distros and windows utilities.

Another advantage to the CD for things like Damn Small Linux is that you're much more likely to come accross a computer that can boot from CD (pretty common on anything 5-6 years old or newer) than a computer that can boot from USB (pretty much only standard new on PCs from the last 1-2 years or so, if that).

Severe Thumbdrive Addiction Syndrome...

[pgnas]

Funny how I shrugged at the rash of thumbdrives out there, that is, until recently. They keep getting cheaper and cheaper and I kept buying them. I have since, stopped, however, it was only after the 12 step program.

Now, what do I keep on mine? Slax - Kill Bill, of course [slax.org] it really has brought me the level of standardization that I need from one computer to the next and it can do all (like many other small distros) the things that I need. I would however recommend something like Truecrypt [sourceforge.net] for ensuring the security of your information. I would also recommend that you back your drive up on a regular basis, these things can be a bit unforgiving.

I could go on and on about the various apps, it really all depends on what you are doing. I do find the following though, very useful: Wireshark (Ethereal) [wireshark.org], Open Office [openoffice.org] and the usual suspects, samba, Etherwake, NVU, Thunderbird, rdesktop, various vnc flavors and other well known management utilities.

If I did not emphasize enough earlier, if you are going to rely on these little gems, I think you should always have an identical spare, and additionally, perform a backup on a regular basis. You might want to get creative and build a library of tools which could be easily accessed remotely to keep your drive lean. I would also highly recommend encrypting data you wouldn't want public.

Doom.

[SanityInAnarchy]

A favorite in high school. Teacher would give us a computer lab for Senior Thesis, then leave to go about other business, and we'd all pull out thumbdrives and play networked Doom.

Very small USB drive

[Midnight Thunder]

I recently went to Malaysia and bought myself an iDisk Tiny [pretec.com]. It try is small, not much bigger than two USB connectors. I wanted to find someone who sold it in Canada, or the USA, but not much luk yet.

Why system restore utilities?

[matt me]

128 megs of malware :)

Unix Tools and such

[SCHecklerX]

I've been working on a nice portable solution myself. Ideally, now that fast hardware and RAM is cheaper, it would be very nice if every OS had a standard virtual machine (java, whatever) and then we could all carry around one suite of tools that works everywhere. That being a dream, most people have windoze at home, so my portable apps are all windoze based. Here's what I've done:

First, you have to deal with the fact that your USB key may not always mount as the same drive letter. I use pstart to take care of this: http://www.pegtop.de/start/ [pegtop.de]. A great little app to give you a consistent environment no matter who's machine you are using.

Next, a unix environment. First, get a bunch of tools (including zsh) from here:
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. Some of these don't work (man, df, etc), so you will want to find better versions elsewhere (they do exist! I just discovered a good version of DF from this thread, thanks! Others include dd, ls). Zsh is the killer app from this suite. A nice shell that does not depend on cygwin. You'll need to create two files to set up your environment. All of my unix tools exist in a subdirectory called 'unixtools' on the key disk.

Start with a script (call it startup) to properly initialize zsh to know where your stuff is. You then initialize zsh from pstart using 'unixtools/zsh.exe startup' Note that $UTD will now be defined as your unix tools drive for use in any other sh scripts you want to write:

UTD="${0%:*}:"

if [ ${#UTD} -gt 2 ]; then
UTD="${PWD%:*}:"
fi

export ZDOTDIR=$UTD/unixtools
export ZSHROOT=$UTD/unixtools
export UTD

exec $ZSHROOT/sh.exe

And of course we need a .zshrc (you need to replace ls with a version I don't recall where is at this moment for DIRCOLORS to work). You can see I have set up some aliases, most notably for gvim (this demonstrates the use of $UTD):

export PS1="[%n@%m %d]$ "
export PATH="$ZSHROOT;$PATH"
export SHELL=zsh

eval `$UTD/unixtools/dircolors.exe $UTD/unixtools/DIRCOLORS`

alias ls='ls -F --color'
alias clear=cls
alias vi="$UTD/gvim/PortableGVim.exe"
alias awk=gawk
precmd () {
title $USERNAME@$HOST: $PWD
}

One app I like to use on the USB drive is freecommander. Unfortunately, this program relies solely on its INI file, and does not take parameters for browsing. To fix this, I wrote the following script called 'browse' for launching it:

#!/sh.exe

FCINI="$UTD/freecommander/freecommand er.ini"
FCTMP="$UTD/freecommander/freecommander.t mp"

if [[ -z "$1" || "$1" == '.' ]]; then
DWP=`echo $PWD | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`
else
DWP=`echo $1 | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`
fi

TRHOME=`echo $HOME | sed -e 's!/!\\\\\\\!g'`

sed -e "s/^Dir2.*/Dir2=$DWP/" $FCINI > $FCTMP
sed -e "s/^Dir1.*/Dir1=$TRHOME/" $FCTMP > $FCINI

exec $UDT/freecommander/freeCommander.exe

Notice above that I can actually use a 'shebang' line, thanks to the $ZSHROOT environment set up in our startup script. Very cool! This even works if you install activestate perl on your key disk. I put perl in unixtools/perl. That means that from your zsh, you can do things like './test' where 'test' has '#!/perl/bin/perl.exe -w' as its first line. I think this is very cool!

I should put this all on a web page one of these days :) Some other things I have on the key disk, that didn't involve quite the devotion of time:

• Sylpheed. I have my home mail server set up to use imap over ssl and smtp auth with ssl. Those two things were a little bit of work to set up. You can always use ssh forwarding instead v