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Adventures with USB storage!
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 29 Jun '05

29 Jun '05

Greetings! Here be a tale or two. Red Hat 9, by the way, on a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop with USB port. To begin at the beginning. For some time I've had a Disgo 256MB USB memory stick. I have had no trouble using this, able to remove it and re-insert it at any time, mount it, and access the files. I set up an entry in /etc/fstab for it which says: /dev/sda1 /flash auto noauto,suid,dev,exec,user 0 0 so, once I've inserted it and something-or-other goes through a detection process, I can 'mount /flash' and all is well. Or was. Yesterday, I spotted a Fujifilm FinePix F440 digital camera on sale at a very interesting price. After checking out reviews (all pretty favourable for general usage) I went back and bought it. A bit speculatively from the Linux point of view, but I reckoned that a similar approach to the USB stick would work. Since it has been some time since the USB stick was last used, the laptop has been rebooted a time of two since then. Having taken a few test photos, I then connected the camera to the USB port, switched it on, waited for the "detect", and then as usual ran 'mount /flash'. Again, all went well, I could download the picture files (JPG) and they were good. Then ran 'umount /flash' and disconnected the camera. Then I tried its "video" function: you can take up to 60 secs of video (with sound) with this camera, which gives you a 4MB AVI file. Again, no problem re-connecting the camera and down- loading the AVI file. (And, by the way, 'xanim' plays these files well). So far so good, and I repeated the above tests a few time (again, disconnecting and reconnecting the camera to the USB port, with 'mount /flash' and 'umount /flash' each time). It looked as though this arrangement would work just the same as for the USB memory stick. But then, to try to explore the reason for something unexpected (see "FINAL INDEPENDENT QUESTION" at end), I inserted the USB memory stick. Unusual and unpromising messages on "autodetect", and 'mount /flash' gave message "mount: No medium found". FAILURE!! So I then explored with happens if I reboot. It's a long story, but this is the summary: A. Repeated connection disconnection of same device following a reboot. 1. Reboot. Insert USB memory stick. It works fine first time, as above. Remove USB stick, reinsert. FAILURE. And it fails every time I re-try unless I reboot. 2. Reboot. Connect camera. Works fine, as above. Switch off camera, disconnect. Re-connect, switch on, and it works fine. Ad infinitum without reboot. B. Alternating connection of the two devices following a reboot. 3. Reboot. Insert USB memory stick. Works fine as at (1). remove USB stick, connect camera. Camera fails (message "no medium found" on 'mount /flash'). Disconnect camera, insert USB memory stick, stick fails (message "/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device" on 'mount /flash'). Exactly the same failure for Camera as previous camera failure. Exactly the same failure for Stick as previous stick failure. Ditto ad infinitum with Camera/Stick/Camera/... 4. Reboot. Connect camera. Works fine as at (2). Disconnect camera, insert Stick. Stick fails with "no medium found". Remove stick, connect camera. Camera OK as at (2). Disconnect camera, insert stick. Stick fails again in exctaly the same way. Camera OK. Stick fails. Camera OK. And so on. SO: Whichever device is first in following a reboot works fine first time. If Stick is first in, it only works first time, and fails subsequently, and Camera always fails. If Camera is first in, it works first time and every time, whether Stick has been used or not; but Stick always fails. So that's the situation. If I only use the Camera, there would be no problem. But I would have to reboot each time I want to use the Stick, whether I have used the Camera or not! Any ideas? (I suspect I may have tickled Red Hat's "kudzu" in some way it didn't like, but I've never managed to disentangle what goes on with kudzu). FINAL INDEPENDENT QUESTION: This is what got the above saga rolling (though I'd have hit it some time anyway). I wanted to transfer the Camera files directly to a different machine networked to the laptop (since I usually keep stuff like photos on the other). Rather than download from Camera to laptop and then ftp them across, I thought I'd try downloading to Machine 2 direct from the camera via NFS. So, with the Camera connected to the laptop and mounted on /flash, from machine 2, I (as root) NFS-mounted the laptop's root directory machine 2. The directory of the Camera memory chip was visible on the laptop, type VFAT, and 'ls .flash' etc. showed all the files on the Camera. However, while the laptop's file system (including the presence of /flash, and files in other directories) was visible from Machine 2, 'ls laptop/flash' showed an empty directory on machine 2. This was unexpected, so I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that what was mounted on the laptop's /flash directory was a USN storage device, was a peculiarity of the camera, or whatever.. Hence I thought I would experiment by trying to NFS-mount the laptop with the Stick in instead. So I plugged in the stick, did 'mount /flash', and then found myself in the above Saga! Therefore, is anyone can answer this independent question as well (or instead of) the business about Stick/Camera conflict, I'd be interested! Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Jun-05 Time: 14:50:31 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Samba expert
by Andy Trevor 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

Guys, any Samba experts out there interested in earing a days wage ? The reason I ask is that I have been approached by someone who needs an independent report written on a Samba install he has done. The reason for the report is that the customer refuses to pay and this is going to the lawyers. We would do it but we are far to busy at the moment. If anyone is interested please contact me off list -- Regards Andy Trevor Technical Director Cutter Project Limited www.cutterproject.co.uk

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Re: [ALUG Announce]Help! iCON - Norfolk CC club directory
by John Seago 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

On Tuesday 28 Jun 2005 06:26, MJ Ray <mjr(a)phonecoop.coop> wrote: > I asked on the main list and had no reply: would someone else who > lives in Norfolk please be the second listed contact for ALUG on > Norfolk County Council's iCON listing? Email me or see > http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2005-June/021852.html for more details. Can I assume from this that Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex have ALUG on their Club/Society/Association lists? -- John Seago GNU/Linux User #219566 http://counter.li.org AFFS http://www.affs.org.uk/

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Cool anti software patent demonstration picture thingy
by Joe Button 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

http://www.softwarepatentdemo.org/index.php?lang=GB

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Unixy question
by Wayne Stallwood 28 Jun '05

28 Jun '05

Not strictly a Linux question, but it could be just as relevant on a Linux system. I have a client with a SCO SYSV Unix Box running a legacy Accounting system. It is a korn shell. They have a Windows based Print Workflow system (called StreamServe I believe) that takes print jobs from a spool folder and prints or emails Credit account statements generated by the Accounting package. Unfortunately the way the queue works is that once a job has been processed by streamserve it is deleted from the queue folder on the Unix box by the streamserve application. The problem is that it is very difficult and time consuming to regenerate the reporting run if something fails upstream of the Streamserve box resulting in lost prints. (this is what happened the other day) I can't tell the streamserve application to not delete the processed jobs as it simply prints whatever is in the queue every time it polls. The Streamserve box looks for a particular file extension before processing the file. I can change the file extension that the Streamserve looks for. So my plan is to change this extension and then have a script that looks for jobs (of the original extension) in the queue and copies them to a archive area before renaming them to a pattern that the (modified) streamserve application is looking for. It is important that I don't introduce any delay of more than a minute or so into the workflow but the print files rarely exceed a couple of MB so that shouldn't be a problem. I could just knock together a script that does this from Cron but in order to not introduce too much of a delay it would have to run about once a minute. This box is quite heavily loaded sometimes and it is of limited performance anyway. So my question is- What is the most efficient way to "watch" a folder for a particular file pattern, if I have a looping "if exist" script is this likely to consume lots of resources as surely it would be continuously polling the disk to check for that file. Is it good practise to do this (perhaps with some sort of introduced delay in the loop) or is there a better/cleaner/more efficient way. Regards Wayne

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[ALUG Announce]Bolton, 14/15 July, FLOSS in Education
by MJ Ray 27 Jun '05

27 Jun '05

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- > From: Tony Whitmore <tony(a)tonywhitmore.co.uk> > > This year's FLOSS in Education (FLOSSIE) conference is being > held in Bolton on the 14th and 15th July. Tickets are just £35 > for individuals and it should be an interesting conference > judging by the speakers. Interest in FLOSS in schools has > increased since the Becta TCO report last month. For more > details, please see: > > http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/flossie/conference200507.html ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 27 Jun '05

27 Jun '05

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Removing dev packages in Ubuntu
by beb 26 Jun '05

26 Jun '05

Evening all, Does anyone know how I find which dev packages I have installed on Ubuntu pls? My apt-cache-fu is lacking ;-) Thanks, beb

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locale question
by Chris Green 22 Jun '05

22 Jun '05

First question - why does the default profile (i.e. /etc/profile) set the LC_ALL environment variable? Surely it would be better to set the LANG variable. If you set LC_ALL it *overrides* any individual settings to other LC_ variables so you can't set LC_CTYPE (for example) while leaving others unset. Second question - is there any easy way to get a sensible (i.e. POSIX) collation sequence while at the same time getting accented characters by setting LC_CTYPE to 'en_GB'? At present I need to:- unset LC_ALL export LC_CTYPE=en_GB export LC_COLLATE=POSIX (unless of course I change /etc/profile, but then it's another system customisation that I'll lose and forget about at the next upgrade) It seems broken to me that the en_GB collate sequence mixes up all the hidden files with normal file, why does it do this? Did it always do this, it's only recently that 'ls -a' has produced what looks to me anyway like a very mixed up output. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Broadband in the Black Hole
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 22 Jun '05

22 Jun '05

Hi Folks, Those interested who haven't already heard may like to learn that a notorious broadband black hole in the region is planned to be filled shortly. Details of the announcement can be found at the Nordelph Web site http://www.nordelph.org/BT/ under the tab "Nordelph Future". In summary, the following exchanges areplanned to be bith ADSL and SDSL enabled by the end of October this year: Broadfield, Hertfordshire; Burnt Fen, Suffolk; Higham, Suffolk; Knarr Cross, Cambridgeshire; Brandon Creek, Norfolk; Nordelph, Norfolk; Linstead, Suffolk; and Six Mile Bottom in Cambridgeshire. The exchanges are to get ADSL, and additionally will also be enabled for SDSL thus benefiting businesses in the area. The work on the exchanges is slated to begin in the next few months and completed by the end of October 2005. (Knarr Cross exchange is by Thorney, East of Peterborough; Burnt Fen exchange is situated near Shippea Hill on the A1101 Littleport-Mildenhall road; all other names can be found on most maps). Now I'm expecting to be asking you folks for advice on setting up ADSL/SDSL on Linux! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 17-Jun-05 Time: 16:24:07 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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