[sf-lug] most of my iso files are stashed (was: Next SF-LUG meeting Monday, November 20, from 6 to 8 PM)

[Michael Paoli]

Is very handy to have lots of ISO files.  :-)

I used to, up until very recently, have a primary location for my
collection thereof, be on an external "USB" drive (well, the enclosure
is USB only, the drive in the enclosure itself isn't USB).

Rather recently, got myself a quite nice sized SSD, and set that
up as primary drive on laptop ... more than enough space to also
have all the ISOs there ... and so they now are (and that's now my
primary location for them).

Even consolidated some various bits I had floating/stashed around.
E.g. had a TAILS 1.0 i386 ISO image (I think I'd copied that from optical
or USB flash at an earlier SF-LUG meeting), ... but had never been able
to earlier validate/verify it.  Did some more searching ...
tracked down a .sig file, checked, and ... failed to verify.
Checked/researched a bit more ... I found various bits suggesting
that file should be about 900 MiB in size ... file I had was *much*
larger.  Checked, and whole lot 'o ASCII nulls on the end.  I truncated
it, rounding up to contain the last 2 KiB block that didn't have all
ASCII nulls, and dropping everything after that.  Checked again,
verification still failed.  Did some more checking/digging/research,
this time to try and find precise size of original signed ISO ...
did find what seemed to indicate that precise size - was slightly
larger than what I'd trimmed to, ... so, I truncated(1)ed it to the
slightly larger size (truncate(1) can also extend logical size,
unwritten blocks are added as sparse), checked again and ... viola,
it validated.  I did also find proper name of the original file
along the way too - tails-i386-1.0.iso so I thusly renamed it.

Anyway, for reference, "the" (my) collection:
https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=balug:cds_and_images_etc
Have all (or most all) of that now available on the laptop.  Might have
some I've not bothered to put on drive - where I have optical, but it's
"so old" I've not bothered to copy it to drive.

I'll probably get around to some updated reporting on my hardware, etc.
adventures.  Did cover some of that earlier, e.g.:
https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2017-October/000135.html
but there's also been quite a bit more since then (mostly upgrade(s),
more configuration bits, etc.).

And yes, handy to have all those ISO images.  E.g. some of them, in
trying to more fully check out exactly what they are, I'd just
quickly set up a virtual machine configured to boot and run "live" from
the CD(/DVD), booted that ISO and ... often much easier to inspect in
detail that way, compared to just looking at the ISO itself and the
files on it.

> From: "Bobbie Sellers" <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] Next SF-LUG meeting Monday, November 20, from 6 to 8 PM
> Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 13:38:56 -0800

> works.   The portable drive in its new case is not seen
> by the Dell.   That is where most of my iso files are stashed.