[tech] mussel

[Nick Bannon]

I played with mussel quite a lot last night - aiming to suck large
quantities of data onto a removable hard drive.

Things of note:

 * Linux was happy about my new large drive, but the BIOS needed a
flash upgrade

 * /services/ftp/machines/mussel has its PDF manual and the BIOS utility

 * After much pain, it seems that talking to drives in the removable
tray is slightly dodgy, at least at high speed. With DMA off it seems
to help.

 * The tray connects to the first IDE channel - ie hda/hdb depending
on whether there's a master or slave. /etc/rc.boot/hdparm will try to
turn DMA off on those.

 * Was playing with masquerading to get upstairs safely onto the
network - there's a 10Mbps tulip in it, with a script in
/etc/rc.boot/masq .

 * The default kernel is 2.2.17 with ext3fs, kernels with ReiserFS
are also there including 2.4.0-test8. Had some problems with both
ext3fs and ReiserFS, but I think it was the cabling/DMA thing. ::-/

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal