The Minimalist Remote Access Kit

Like many folk, I carry around a USB pen disk/key fob, and mine is stocked with a few goodies. These days I carry a 2GB disk containing:

• A 650MB Truecrypt image with:
  • A specially packaged Citrix client from Thinstall.
  • Portable (UPX-compressed) versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim and PuTTY (mostly tweaked versions from the PortableApps Suite).
  • My Cygwin home directory (including SSH keys).
  • A set of bash, Python and VBScript files for automating various tasks
• Autorun Presenter, modified to use the PowerPoint 2007 viewer.

I use the same Truecrypt image daily on my laptop, which means I can switch laptops within five minutes with minimum hassle. It also helps that I have been using solely Citrix as a working environment for over a year and that I have no data whatsoever on my laptop.

The 650MB size makes for very easy backup (it fits on a CD), but if that's too big for you, you can always try my previous setup:

When my daily work involved frequent access to remote machines, all I needed to carry around was the PuTTY suite for SSH, the Windows XP RDP client and a couple of VNC binaries.

(Any other box running any other OS had what I needed, so there was no point in, say, carrying around a mini-Linux distro).

The whole thing weighs in at around 3MB (1.5MB compressed), and can be slimmed down by tossing help files and half of the binaries:

mstsc.exe (380KB)                      - Windows XP Remote Desktop binary
mstscax.dll (584KB)                    - Dependency for above
pageant.exe (124KB)                    - PuTTY authentication agent
plink.exe (236KB)                      - PuTTY command-line connection utility
pscp.exe (248KB)                       - PuTTY secure copy
psftp.exe (248KB)                      - PuTTY secure FTP
putty.exe (364KB)                      - PuTTY terminal
putty.hlp (455KB)                      - Help file
putty.cnt (25KB)                       - Dependency for above
puttygen.exe (156KB)                   - PuTTY keygen
vnc-4.0b4-x86_win32_viewer.exe (248KB) - RealVNC client
vncviewer.exe (352KB)                  - TightVNC client
isp.txt (256B)                         - List of ISP access numbers

Just for curiosity, I also used to have the full Citrix ICA client for Windows (version 9.0), which adds up to another 10MB or so (even without compressing the executables or pruning unnecessary DLLs).

• PortableApps - Firefox, Thunderbird and the like, ready to go.
• A list of miscellaneous software that can run from USB drives.