I’ve been planning on turning the Chumby into a websever using lighttpd, thought it’d be kind of cool to make it do something useful rather than just standing there and showing me the time or recent facebook updates. My first idea was to just put my site on a usb disk, then run lighttpd. This was all well and good, but everytime I updated the site I had to unplug the usb disk, update the files, re-insert and then restart the chumby. This was long - and boring.
An alternative method already built into the chumb is SCP, this again was better and allowed me to easily copy files from my macbook to the chumby. This was cool, but I could only use it via the command-line and it doesn’t provide directory listing. So, I looked for a better way, the FTP way. The chumby doesn’t come with an FTP server, but with the gcc compiler installed all it took was to find an ftp server written in C. Along came Pure-FTPd, a free FTP server with full source code available that can work on a huge range of systems.
Installation
Follow the steps below to install Pure-FTPd onto your chumby (note that this has only been tested on a chumby one, but should work on others). The instructions are pretty much identical to the ones found on the documentation here, just with a minor change to take into account that the chumby uses a read-only filesystem.
Note that you’ll need gcc on your chumby, look at my previous chumby post for how to do this.
- Download Pure-FTPd from here
- Uncompress the pure-ftpd.tar.gz folder
- Copy the extracted folder to a usb disk and insert into chumby
- Turn on your chumby and ssh to it
- cd to to ‘mnt/usb/pure-ftpd’
- type ‘./configure -prefix=/mnt/storage/local’ hit enter (this tells it to install it to the storage area of the chumby that is writable)
- Wait, it will take a while
- When that’s finally finished, type ‘make install-strip’ hit enter
- Wait a lot longer
- Hopefully all will have gone well and you’ve now installed Pure-FTPd on your chumby!
Running
To run Pure-FTPd, enter ‘mnt/storage/local/sbin/pure-ftpd’, this will start the FTP service, all you have to do is connect to it now!
Connecting
Open your favourite FTP client, add a new connection with your chumby’s IP address and ‘root’ for the username, no password. You’ve now successfully connected to your chumby and can move files all you want.