[Ubuntu-be] Massive USB multiplier

[Jan Bongaerts]

Being part of the development is way above my capcity, but I can help you
brainstorm for names.

The first that sprang to mind was Copycat.
You could make varieties of this, like Copylion or copytiger, 'cos it does
it like a boss, or the other way round, Copykitten, because it's such a
light application.
In the same line, you could say Copybox, because it's a little kinda
dropbox that starts copying everything you put in there.

I'll see what else comes up.

On 25 September 2012 00:33, Wouter Vandenneucker <woutervddn at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all
>
> As some of you might know, last sunday (yesterday) there was a dipro fair
> in Hasselt.
> Since both William (leader USB stick project) and Claudio (leader ISO
> project) where present, we talked about the new USB sticks and tried some
> things.
>
> At the moment we're having sticks with 1 single ISO on it and some sticks
> with a multiboot of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu on them.
> It striked us that we needed a simple way to copy files to the usb drives.
> (So we bought a hub at dipro to be able to write more USBcards at the same
> time)
> We used ddrescue to copy the image, but having to look for the right names
> of the devices and copying them 1 by 1, changing the drive letter was a bit
> cumbersome.
>
> So this evening I set out to simplify that issue.
>
> *Ultimate goal -* masterstyle
> I'm thinking about a small personal project that I've nicknamed "black
> box". The goal would be that you insert all drives, tell the program what
> the master is and it would duplicate that master to all the rest. Ideally,
> it would take the right image itself and copy to all drives without user
> input.
>
> I was thinking about a single board computer with only 1 button and an
> LED. Pressing the button would make the script run, autoselecting the right
> image from the harddrive (sda) and copying it to all usb devices attached
> to it (sd*).
> *
> There I fixed it -* hackerstyle
> So where are we at after 1 evening of coding?
> I made a script called autoDD.sh (if you know a cooler name, please shoot!)
> I'm not going to bother you all with the code right now, but this is how
> it works:
>
> you launch the script by typing:
>
>> *sudo bash autoDD.sh /Master/Image/Or/Drive*
>>
>
> The script only works if you've got a computer with 1 harddrive (SDA) and
> if you've got a USB with the master file on it.
> you insert that first, before the empty usb drives. you call the script
> with:
>
> *sudo bash autoDD.sh /dev/sdb*
>>
>
> Now the script always rejects /dev/sda because I've told it that that is
> the default harddrive, then it takes the drive you've provided (/dev/sdb)
> and then it copies that content to all other /dev/sd* devices.
>
> *Things to test
> *There are a couple things I need/want to test before releasing the code:
>
>    - having a master file in an ISO format.
>       - normally the script already works if you want this. You could in
>       theory provide autoDD.sh with a /path/to/ISO instead of a /dev/sdb, but I
>       haven't test it
>    - speed when writing to more than 1 or 2 USB devices at the same time
>       - Again, in theory all should be fine, but I didn't test it.
>
>
> I'll test these things this week and I'll try to add a failsafe for people
> with more harddrives in their computer. (because this script will ruin your
> system if you have more than 1 hdd and/or if it isn't sda.
>
> That being said, the script successfully copied the contents of 1 stick to
> 2 other sticks during my late night snack, so it does work.
> If someone has a better idea to make it a real "blackbox" (with that I
> mean 1 button, 1 LED, tons of USB slots and no screen, mouse or keyboard),
> please give your views..
>
> Grts
>
>
> Wouter
>
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-- 
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