I could tell that my newly installed debian system had booted from the netconsole logs, but I couldn't ssh into it. I finally ran nmap on the static IP address I had configured it to use. It said all 1000 ports were closed. The device responds to ping. I am about to boot back to pogoplug and examine this with chroot, but could the default installation have forgotten to install a server? I installed rsyslog, but the last several times I tried to examine the system logs after pulling the disk, there was nothing there because the buffers didn't get flushed.

Just to make sure I understand: You used Jeff's script to create a Debian system and then, without trying to see if it would boot and work with a dynamic IP, you modified it to use a static IP address? If so, I'd undo the changes and test the load to see if it works dynamically. If it does, then I'd ask how you made the static mod. Did you change /etc/network/interfaces? When I did this the first time, I made a mistake and left Debian unable to set up the ethernet port. But, you're sure it is pingable at the static IP address, huh (and, as a test, not pingable when you pull the ethernet connector)? Well, you could set up a quick shell script in in /etc/rc2.d to squirrel away a copy of 'dmesg' somewhere and then sync, but for future such encounters, I'd recommend getting the console working. Good luck.

Safest way to assign a static ip address is to use a MAC address filter rule in your router, if you're able to set one up. That way the Dockstar still gets an IP address via DHCP but the Router will always give it a specific address. Helps to prevent situation where you'd end up breaking an install by changing config details and moving it to another network or router.

The first time I tried it with the interface file unmodified, I couldn't even ping it. My router is set up so that if a DHCP request comes in from that MAC address it always gets a particular address, so I know where it is. This works fine when booted in the pogoplug system. It appears that when booted to Debian it wasn't completing the DHCP request. That's why I set it to a static address different from the address assigned to it in the router so I could tell if it was somewhat alive and really on the network. Of course I modified /etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
	address 192.168.1.22
	netmask 255.255.255.0
	broadcast 192.168.1.255
	gateway 192.168.1.1

So I learned that it can talk to the network, it appears it can't do DHCP properly, and it has no open ports probably because no servers were started. If I really wanted to make sure that it wasn't doing DHCP properly, I could stop the DHCP service on the router and enable it on my desktop system where I can see the system log, but I don't think I really need to do that.

I went ahead and reinstalled the system. It took a long time after the reboot before it appeared on the network, but it finally became available.