Eye Current: The New Sneakernet

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

The New Sneakernet

First, we had the original sneakernet. Moving files from one computer to the other using the venerable floppy. Some of us remember using 90K floppies, which seemed reasonable enough considering that the microcomputers at the time only supported 64K of memory. Although floppy sizes grew it didn't take long to figure out that floppy disks just didn't have a enough capacity to do the job. Along the way there were Bernoulee drives, optical drives, zip drives and LS 120 SuperDrives. The problem was that the drives were expensive and proprietary, none of the drives ever achieved a real acceptance among most users. CDs worked somewhat. They have 720 Megs of storage and the media is relatively cheap. The problem is that burning to them is time consuming and requires special software that isn't always compatible. Anyone who has burnt CDs have been a victim to Nero, or the Adaptec/Roxio suites. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It never seems to work correctly when you are in a hurry and is troublesome if you want to run real applications that might need real read write access. Even RW CDs are primarily a write once and read many times media.

Flash memory disks are nothing new. PCMCIA flashcards have been around forever and have a standard interface in most laptops. We at PCO installed a flashdrive run system in MEPS 2. A bootable flash drive using DOS 6.22 and another drive that accepted flash cards. It held the programs, experiment procedures, and the collected data. A sneakernet in its finest hour.

USB thumb drives have evolved with the realization on how handy Digital camera memory can be. They are getting cheaper every day. It used to be that laptops were taken everywhere along with a box heaped full of floppies. The Texas heat and humidity helped assure that the files could be read from the floppies only every once in a while. The Laptop assured that I had all my utilities well in hand and carting it around was pretty good for body building. It also had my email programs with my contact information. Handheld PCs, a Personal Information Manager, work pretty good, but they don't work well for sneakernet functions.

USB thumbdrives are a good method of moving files around and can be a powerful tool. For instance:

We enter a control room and the Unix based system needs to have some of its configuration and script files restored. We ask to borrow a networked PC. I plug in a USB drive.
Open up Firefox, Thunderbird, or a FTP program on the USB drive. Fetch the file into my thumb drive.
Unzip the file and use the command file2disk.exe to make a tared floppy.

The significance in this situation is the fact that I only needed to bring a thumbdrive into the control room and maybe a blank floppy. No tools I used left a footprint and there was no install process, because all the programs are "portable" (meaning there is no installation procedure, no writing to the registry, and no passwords are left behind).

A good place to start looking for portable programs would be at PortableApps.com. A suite of programs can be found there and a whole pile of other applications. Most notably OpenOffice.org Portable. This is a full featured office suite capable of presentations, spreadsheets, word processors and more compatible MS Office documents. It's free and can be compared to high priced applications.

An invaluable tool to me is Calc98, This is a scientific calculator that not only has any practical function I am ever going to use but has a great units conversion feature.

File2dsk & dsk2file Useful for storing Tarred Diskettes to PC files and back again. These are command line programs.

There are also versions of Thunderbird, and Firefox.

These days I find my self running around with a few thumbdrives in my pocket. Some for data backups, a couple for specific software installs, a couple to run a few utilities while "borrowing" a computer, and even a couple for crash recovery.

Labels: Computing