From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Sep 13 12:48:32 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 929F716A41F for ; Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:48:32 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6054F43D46 for ; Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:48:31 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 769D95E13; Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:48:30 -0400 (EDT) Received: from pi.codefab.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (pi.codefab.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 05224-01; Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:48:27 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [192.168.1.3] (pool-68-161-79-217.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.161.79.217]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5C9705C5D; Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:48:27 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <4326CAA1.7020005@mac.com> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 08:48:33 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050801 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: jeff.hamann@forestinformatics.com References: <52793.12.154.211.2.1126590338.squirrel@www.forestinformatics.com> In-Reply-To: <52793.12.154.211.2.1126590338.squirrel@www.forestinformatics.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at codefab.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: usb advice X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:48:32 -0000 Jeff D. Hamann wrote: > When I do connect directly, I would love to be able to > simply plug in a mouse and keyboard into the two ports on the front of the > machine (automount?) and then yank them out when I'm done with my chores. > Is this even possible? Sure, I hot-plug USB keyboards into the front panel USB connections of Dell PowerEdge and HP DL360/DL370 rack-mount boxes regularly. Works fine, so long as the machine does not also have a PS/2 keyboard attached. > More importantly, I would like to utilize a USB hard drive connection > (maybe one of those hard drive cases for laptops) for creating a nightly > backup of the data on my hard drive. I could store much more data than > either tape drive of DVD drive and could rotate a couple of disks for > additional security. Tape is significantly more reliable over the long term than today's hard drives. Given that LTO and sDLT will go up to 300 GB per tape (double that with compression), capacity alone should not disqualify tape from your consideration. > Can FreeBSD handle this or would I seimply need to > install the addtional hard drive within the machine itself and use it as a > backup? This isn't really an option since the backup would need to go off > site (vault storage). FreeBSD works okay with USB mass storage, although the firewire support seems to be a little better/faster. > I get the feeling that USB support on FreeBSD isn't grand and I'm working > with FreeBSD 6.0BETA4 right now and when I tried to automount a USB flash > drive, the machine rebooted when I pulled the drive out of the port. Don't do that. Always unmount a filesystem before yanking the underlying hardware. -- -Chuck