I used to carry a sort of emergency kit of digital media. It started out with a few linux disks and one Windows 98 SE disk and eventually progressed to a fairly well thought out array of support tools. Unfortunately I haven’t traveled for a while and I forgot just how important such things were. Until my trip to Boston last week when my Dell system’s hard drive encrypting by WinMagic locked up for no particularly good reason. It just took my username and password and spit out an error 0×00007212 and told me to call Win Magic. I’m supposed to get support today for the problem and I’ll let you know how that turns out.

In the meanwhile I thought I’d list out what I’ve put in my new rescue kit. It’s a miscellany of operating systems and media types. Basically, if I can carry it on a CD, I do. Why? Because many people don’t have DVD drives in their laptops, so the older standard is more useful for rescue utilities.

1. Solaris x86 install disc. I currently support Sun systems and it’s always useful to be able to boot into the mini-root.
2. Solaris sparc install disc. Same problem, different chip architecture. There may be a dual boot disc, but for now I have two discs to solve the problem.
3. knoppix bootable CD. I’ve used knoppix in the past to fix things that were somewhat Windows problems but linux was an easier way to fix them.
4. Ubuntu desktop 32-bit install CD.  I love Ubuntu, but I have the same criticism here that I have of Solaris.  This disc can help me install or run a liveCD of Ubuntu for my laptop, but if my co-worker has a 64 bit processor, I can’t help him.  Anyhow, for those new to Ubuntu, it’s probably the best attempt at an XP like desktop.  Not much changes (except behind the scenes) so you don’t have to keep learning how to use it every time you upgrade.
5. BartPE.  It’s a bootable Windows environment.  Good for repairing XP.
6. Darik’s Boot and Nuke.  This is a disk wiper utility.  If for some reason you need to ship a disk this utility will help destroy the information on it in a way that makes forensics much more difficult.
7. Gparted and Clonezilla.  GpartEd is a partition editor similar to an old utility called DiskMagic.  If you need to resize your partitions, this is the best way to do it.  Of course, you should run backups first, but if you’re on the road you may have to take a few chances.  Clonezilla is used to make disk images.  It’s good if you need to be able to quickly restore the same system back to exactly the same state quickly.  It’s also good for propagating a disk image to a lot of similar systems.
8. Puppy Linux.  This is THE THING I WOULD HAVE PAID $100 FOR LAST WEEK!  Puppy linux is so lightweight you can run it off of a USB stick, but you need the disk to create the USB stick(or just carry a USB stick of it).  It’s ultra easy to use, so much so that many call it linux for grandmas.
9. XP Install media.  It’s old school, but I still try to keep it around if I can.
10. l0phtcrack.  This is used to get Windows passwords off of systems.  Some consider it a hacker tool.  I consider it a rescue executive tool because I’ve been expected in the past to magically make things work without access to their systems.  I’ve also used it to refine system building techniques so that I never write a good password to the filesystem in a way that l0phtcrack can crack it.  It appears that this product may not be available any more.  I’ll try to see if I can find something new.
11. Miscellaneous.  Customize this area to tools that you need but will be hard to acquire remotely.  I include my corporate VPN software for multiple OSs and Truecrypt(although fairly available, I prefer to not have to md5sum it every time I DL it.)
12. Some blank CDs and DVDs.  Useful if you need to DL and use new tools for some things.
13. Entertainment discs.  Entertainment makes me work better, so I always pack some.  Usually 2 DVDs full of movies ripped to AVI, 1 nonverbal music disk(trance/monks chanting/enya), 1 normal music disk and 1 disk of books on CD.

Please let me know if I forgot something or if you don’t concur.  Now I need to run to work.

Photo courtesy of PSD

• GTDTiddlyWiki
  • This is a neat tool. A wiki is a tool that people use to collaborate on projects or ideas. This one is handy as it uses the Getting Things Done action management system. It’s handy for organizing your chores, projects, life, etc.
    
• ClamWinPortable
  • It’s a free virus scanner.
• xmplay
  • A really lightweight MP3 player.
    
• 7-zip
  • It’s a freeware winzip replacement.
    
• AutoHotkey
  • It’s a scripting tool for windows. Handy for handling monotonous tasks.
    
• Contig
  • It’s a file defragmenter. You know how you can defrag entire hard drives? Well this will defrag just one file. It’s a windows command line tool. Useful when you’re having problems burning an ISO.
• cpu-z
  • This is a tool that analyzes your windows hardware configuration. It will tell you what motherboard you have, what firmware it’s loaded on, what speed your memory is running on. And you don’t have to install it. Very useful.
    
• jdiskreport
  • It analyzes your disk utilization. Handy for finding out where your hard drive space is going to. Remember kids, any hard drive filled more than 80% full will take forever to defragment.
    
• Kar Kare
  • A palm program that keeps a record of my vehicle maintenance. It also keeps track of your gas mileage and then reminds you when new maintenance is due. Very useful, dirt cheap, and the programmer is really nice. He’s shipped me the executable like 4 times when I’ve lost it. Hence the reason I now carry it on my palm and also on my thumbdrive.
    
• Portaputty
  • When accessing systems remotely you need to do it securely so crooks don’t steal your data. Putty is a free version of SSH that lets you get onto boxes and do work remotely. Remember kids, telnet is bad. It’s so bad that it would rape your grandma if it only had legs.
    
• UnxUtils.zip
  • Cygwin is awesome. But you have to install it, so it’s not very portable. UnxUtils offers many of the command line tools you’re used to in unix but they’re compiled for windows.
    
• QuickPar
  • Par files are used to ensure you actually got the information that was intended to be sent to you. They can also be used to rebuild files that are damaged if you have enough of them. This is a free solution for that. Useful for newsgroup lovers.
    
• ImgBurn
  • Useful for burning ISOs.
    
• TightVNC
  • Useful for securely, remotely, accessing GUIs.
    
• PortableApps
  • An office replacement. Not as powerful, but free and portable.
• pscp/psftp
  • A part of the putty suite. It’s a free secure copy binary. Let’s you securely copy files from one machine to another via a network.
• cwRsync
  • Remote sync is used to compare data from two different locations. You can set it up to pull data from one place to another or use it for backups or all kinds of stuff.
    
• Documents
  Some scripts I’ve worked on – because reusing code is smart.
  Some PDFs
  
• A little music
  • Because lifes too short to not rock.

Thanks,

Daniel J. Doughty

Here’s the particular thumbdrive I’m using at the moment. By putting it on my keychain, I don’t end up leaving it in my pants. Which is handy, because I’ve nuked a few by washing and drying them. They’re ok the first few times you do that, but after a while they croak.