Amazon shipped me the PogoPlug V4 faster than I expected. It landed on my doorstep this afternoon. It’s a little bigger than I thought, but not by much. I also ordered a couple of add-ons:

ArchLinuxARM can only boot from the top USB port. That’s why I bought the tiny flash drive. I wanted the lid to close. The wifi adapter won’t see action for a few days yet.

Installation was mostly painless, with only a couple of snags that I sorted out using their help forum.

The ArchLinux package that needs downloading is 188.3 MB. The problem is that the PogoPlug internal flash can only hold about 55 MB. The instructions on the Arch site need a bit of revision.

The first is that bsdtar is not needed, and that you need to cd into the flash drive for the download to fit. The regular tar command will work where bsdtar will fail. It will throw a warning, tar: warning: skipping header ‘x’, but it completes without error.

Step 9 is listed as:

It needs to be:

The rest of the steps work without modification.

After the reboot I was able to ssh into the new install. As always, there’s a few things that need to be done.

Update the system:

Install some needed packages:

Reboot, then do some basic sysadmin tasks:

Over the next few weeks I’ll be setting up the PogoPlug to be a Time Machine backup server and maybe an ad-blocking wifi access point. Stay tuned.