Because I got a very good offer I’ve ordered a PogoPlug as cheap NAS.
PogoPlug comes with a very good preinstalled software and you can manage nearly everything by the feature rich web frontend.

But there are a few things I’ve realized too late.

• The preinstalled software is closed source.
• There’s no FTP, Samba or similar interface.
• To enable multiuser support and password protected folders you have to pay a fee.

For the 3. step I’ve weighened up if it’s easier to pay this fee or write my own software for it. Regarding to the official price list PogoPlug Family was the package I needed to make it possible for my wife to share her folders and upload files by mail.

Because the webinterface seems to do what it should I’ve bought the Family package.
But what I’ve nowhere read is that it’s only possible to share password protected folders with Family+.

So I’m almost happy with this but it had been fine to know this before you make your decision with package you take.

Back to topic:

Preparing /opt

To use the PogoPlug as FTP server or to be able to install additional optware I’ve found very good help on the internet and installed IPKG with following steps.
Please note that you’ll need an empty USB-Stick as filesystem.

1. Login to https://my.pogoplug.com and enable SSH access checking Settings -> Security -> Enable SSH access for this Pogoplug device and reset your password by clicking on change password.
2. Find the IP address of your PogoPlug (I’ve found mine in my router web interface)
3. Connect to your PogoPlug with SSH using username „root“ and password defined in step 1.
4. The filesystem is mounted readonly so you can’t perform any changes to it. Let’s change this using

   mount -o remount,rw /

5. Create the storage for your optware with

   mkdir /opt

6. Eject every attached USB-Device using the webinterface and unplug it.
7. Run

   df -h

8. Plug the USB-Stick in an empty slot and run it again. You should notice a new line, this is your USB-Stick. This line should look similar to

   /tmp/.cemnt/sdb1          3.2G     65.2M      3.2G   2% /tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sdb1

9. Now you know that your USB-Stick is located at /tmp/.cemnt/sdb1.
10. Eject it by using the webinterface and run following command

    mount /tmp/.cemnt/sdb1 /opt

    Please replace sdb1 with your device if it’s different.

Installing IPKG

Now you’ve mounted your USB-Stick to /opt, let’s install IPKG executing these commands:

cd /opt
wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/ipkg-opt_0.99.163-10_arm.ipk
tar -xOvzf ipkg-opt_*_arm.ipk ./data.tar.gz | tar -C / -xzvf -
mkdir -p /opt/etc/ipkg
echo "src cross http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable" > /opt/etc/ipkg/armel-feed.conf
echo "src native http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/native/unstable" >> /opt/etc/ipkg/armel-feed.conf

Get ready to install applications

Before you can install applications using IPKG you have to fetch server information about available packages.

To do this you can run

/opt/bin/ipkg update

If this does not fail everything is working perfect.

Now you are able to search and install applications on your PogoPlug.
For detailed usage of IPKG you can run ipkg with the –help flag:

/opt/bin/ipkg --help

Install a FTP-Server (bftpd)

Bftpd is a lightweight FTP-Server which can be installed using IPKG.
To do this you can run

/opt/bin/ipkg install bftpd

If successfully installed you shoud edit the configuration file at /opt/etc/bftpd.conf and afterwards start it using

/opt/sbin/bftpd -d