On Wednesday 29 October 2008 09:35:32 Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday 28 October 2008 15:34, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com>
wrote:
2008/10/29 Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com>:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> wrote: <snip>
Only in the past few weeks have I seriously considered switching drive manufacturers, though, after an email exchange with WD in which they say that their product is unsupported under Linux.
That's a curious notion. They obviously must
The Western Digital drive I just bought (see below) does include some Mac-specific software that performs the breathtaking function of telling you (in a system menu) how much of the drive is currently occupied by file data _and_ (get this) presents this utilization fraction in a front-panel bar-graph-style display comprising 8 white-light LEDs behind the front panel. All very cute... [...]
The ironic thing is that many if not most of these WD "MyBook" drives actually run BusyBox (embedded Linux) under the hood. The "My Book World Edition" (which, out of the box, is probably one of the most unreliable pieces of network kit I've ever played with) can, with a little bit of judicious hacking, be turned into a full-blown file/print/mail server, albeit one with a very slow network interface (I think because the ARM processor in the unit is so underpowered). I have had to recover 2 of these units for their owners - the original hard disk images that WD used to build the drivers had corruption/errors that would cause the units to remount their shared partition as read-only at random times. The only fix was to remove the drive and mount it on my desktop machine, repartition/reformat and reload known-good software images. Incidentally, I got exactly the same response from WD tech support. The documentation states that these drives use Samba and can be mounted in the conventional way under Windows ("Tools, Map Network Drive"), yet it does not work properly. WD Tech Support said, "The samba support is incomplete and we never intended them to be used that way". They should have told their documentation writers. Nevertheless, after the rebuild (and upgrading Samba, enabling ssh access and installing a few extras such as ClamAv (run periodically from cron) and a couple of other goodies they turn out to be pretty useful little NAS devices. OK, enough OT rambling. I guess it just goes to show that just because WD don't support Linux, it doesn't mean that they don't USE it in some of their products. They just do their level best to hide the fact... Cheers, Rodney. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================