I have a cron-scheduled backup task, that writes to a USB drive. (It’s a SATA drive stuck in an external dock that is connected to my machine via USB.) This usually auto-mounts at /media/backups (since “backups” is the partition label for the single partition on the drive.) My problem is that it isn’t always mounted. It’s always physically connected, but on a fairly regular basis, the mount point isn’t there. When I’m logged in, it’s [...]

I have a small server that boots from a usb drive and i would like to protect myself from the drive dying. I can’t add another hard drive. My question is: can i add one or two usb sticks of the same size and mirror the first one, so i can just unplug the first one when it dies and just reboot? I’d like to avoid reinstalling everything. I am ok with a hourly or [...]

My company recently wasted a lot of time restoring data from corrupted USB disk backups. Everyone here is now keen to prevent the same happening again – but before buying the $5K tape drive now recommended I wanted to investigate a bit further. The data recovery company that helped restore our data told our engineer that backing up to USB disk is a stupid idea. I wanted to find out why this might be, but [...]

I would like to install Ubuntu on a hard drive that is accessed via USB. Then, when all is OK, replace the computer hard disk with that one that was USB-connected. (Computer used for USB installation and the one receiving the HD is the same machine) Is there any problem with this approach? (like drive not recognized the same way by Ubuntu via USB and via (internal) SATA? boot record issues ?) I’m pretty sure [...]

I have a requirement to disable USB thumb drives, while still allowing other USB devices such as a portable hard drive. Is there a way to do this in Linux? I know the Windows side has some software that enforces this, and need to do the same on Linux. You can write a hal policy to make some forms of media unmountable. I’m not quite sure how you’d distinguish a thumb drive from a hard [...]

I inherited a backup plan from the previous sysadmin that looks like this: Backup each 150GB of data from two fileservers to two 3.5in external harddrive (USB 2.0) by mapping the data partitions to our quad-core Dell R200 server (Windows Server 2003) and runs ntbackup (full backup running on thursday night). Each backup takes 9 hours to complete. The external hdds will be taken home by the COO every friday (our company is closed on [...]

I have a few servers in a rack that like to drop their network connection, requiring a restart and/or handheld intervention. I purchased a Linksys NSLU2 and installed Debian on it in order to create a serial terminal. However, with USB-Serial converters running in the $30 range I’d really like to use USB (I have plenty of USB cables). Is there a way to get Ubuntu Server to listen for “serial” terminals on a USB [...]

We are looking at temporarily mounting an external hard disk on USB to an ESX1 v4 server from VMware. In /var/log/messages, we see the messages of the device being connected, but we cannot figure out the actual name of the device (/dev/???) to actually mount so we can retrieve the files ? This is possible to do but no simple task unless you have a server that supports passthrough for USB http://vstorage.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/usb-passthrough-in-vsphere-4-1/ Any easier approach [...]

I have three USB ports on my Cisco ASA 5505. All Cisco documentation that I’ve found says that they’re for ‘future use’. Anyone know if this has been updated? Or if it will be? As far as I know this hasn’t changed. The newer Cisco ACE’s USB ports are for “future use” as well. Check more discussion of this question. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers [...]

I need to store 100k files (around 40GB) in a USB drive. Each file has a unique int id (e.g 45000). Option one is to put all files in a single folder: root/ root/1.pdf root/2.pdf root/3.pdf … root/567.pdf root/568.pdf root/569.pdf … root/10001.pdf root/10002.pdf root/10003.pdf … root/99998.pdf root/99999.pdf root/100000.pdf Option two is to create a [1-9][0-9]* folder hierarchy based on that id: root/ root/1/file.pdf root/2/file.pdf root/3/file.pdf … root/5/6/7/file.pdf root/5/6/8/file.pdf root/5/6/9/file.pdf … root/1/0/0/0/1/file.pdf root/1/0/0/0/2/file.pdf root/1/0/0/0/3/file.pdf … root/9/9/9/9/8/file.pdf [...]