[PLUG] Booting from a USB Thumb Drive

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Mon Dec 15 05:20:53 UTC 2008


While playing with compact flash cards for hard disk replacement, I
also built Ubuntu on top of a 4GB USB thumb drive attached to my
Thinkpad T30.  The T30 has a USB1.1 interface, and is dreadfully slow
with a flash drive - 5 minutes to boot and login to the desktop. 

I plan to use a flash drive as my OpenVPN certification environment.
Running offline and booting from the flash, I can sign keys for VPN
clients without exposing the process to The Bad Guys.  I then copy
the keys to the hard drive, boot normally, and distribute the keys to
the appropriate machines.  If I was extra paranoid, I could boot each
target machine from the thumb drive and copy one key each, offline.

Perhaps there is an easier way to do it.  I don't want to sign
keys with an online machine, I don't want to maintain a whole
offline computer, and 4GB thumb drives are less than $10 and easily
carried around.  I can keep a couple of spares locked in my safe.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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