Now and then I used to come in touch with a PC (a laptop) of a friend of mine. This PC used to display a rather strange behavior. This PC, running Windows 7, would not correctly mount any usb hard disk or pendrive, except for a few new USB 3.0 drives. This Asus laptop had a really convoluted installation history, as even specifying the precise model it is not very easy to uniquely determine the specific driver to install for a given device. It turns out that every re-installation is made is a sort of trial-and-error procedure and the final outcome is, as one can see, not very nice.
usb
Fixing the frontpanel USB ports, One at time
Today I decided to fix my front panel USB , that were since long gone due an unspecified issue on my Asustek mobo (WYGIWYP, what-you-get-is-what-you-paid). Since the usual remedies wouldn’t work (resetting CMOS, changing front panel, BIOS fiddling) I decided to tackle the problem the hard way, by bypassing the motherboard completely.
Western digital messes with my boot
As previously metioned here, I had boot issues with my new Motherboard, and my external Western Digital USB hard disk. But it’s really a motherboard fault, or not? It turns out other cheap USB enclosures dont’ endanger my boot like the WD hard disk does. A little google-fu revealed that it’s indeed Western Digital fault, … Leggi tutto
A quick and dirty udevadm script
This script (very dirty) was handful to me to discover some parameters (e.g KERNELS) to differentiate on udev/rules.d rules similar devices on a physical usb port basis. It’s relased under the GNU General Public License and with no guaranties. Please read the Disclaimer. It needs of course udevadm and less. Syntax is: showdevicedetails.sh #!/bin/bash # … Leggi tutto
The day the sheevaplug died
Tonight the sheevaplug died, sending napalmpiri.openssl.it down. Dead cold. I suspected at once a PSU issue, and that turned out to be too true.
Warning: twiddling with the PSU means dealing with electricity at dangerous voltages. It involves a dangerous hot soldering iron. If you are not skilled these things may conjure up and ruin your day. Or you may burn down the house. This is not a joke. If you don’t feel confident, just buy another plug.
Unfortunately Globalscale technologies gives only a 30 days warranty, so I was basically stuck.
I think that the sheevaplug, from the hardware point, is really flaky. It may be good as a developer tool, but it’s just too flaky even as a home server.