Once you have enabled SSH access to your Pogoplug, you can enable scheduled jobs via cron.

Cron is a Linux system process that will execute a program at a preset time.

You can configure cron to run programs automatically for you every year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and many combinations of these.

Your Pogoplug runs a version of Busybox (to find out which version, just run "busybox" at the shell). Version 1.7 on the Pogoplug includes crond, the cron daemon. To find out if your Pogoplug has cron built in, try using the following command:

• type crond

It should return something similar to crond --> busybox

You cannot run crond on your Pogoplug without the crontabs directory. To enable cron, you need to create the crontabs directory. The crond process expects this directory at /var/spool/cron/crontab, which does not exist.

In order to run scheduled tasks, you need to

1. format a USB drive as a Linux partition (I'd recommend EXT3) and
2. mount that USB drive as to the same folder every time you reboot
3. create a crontab file named "root" with your scheduled tasks
4. link /var/spool to a spool folder on your USB drive

Because /var is a link to /tmp/var, it is emptied every time the Pogoplug reboots. You'll need to create a startup script that mounts the drive, creates the directory link to your USB drive, and starts the crond process.

Assuming that you are mounting your Linux-formatted USB drive to /opt, do the following:

• mkdir -p /opt/spool/cron/crontab
• ln -s /opt/spool /var/spool
• crond
• crontab -e

This puts you in 'vi' to edit the scheduled tasks for the user 'root'. Wikipedia has a nice entry on how to set up the crontab file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron#Predefined_scheduling_definitions

Upon reboot, however, the directory link disappears and the cron daemon will not start. To get the cron daemon to start automatically, create a startup script that contains the following two lines:

• ln -s /opt/spool /var/spool
• crond

Again, this is assuming that your Linux-formatted USB drive is mounted as /opt. You may also want to search the articles and forums for methods to persistently mount devices at the same location.