Tag Archives: Linux

Wolverine SixPac and Linux

The 20 GB SixPac Media Reader & Storage Drive is an external drive with integrated card readers for 6 of the most common Flash cards. It works fine with the CF and SD cards I’ve thrown at it, but I couldn’t get Linux to recognise it. The partition table of the device isn’t a standard drive table, instead being more like a floppy which is fine for Windows but fdisk returned some strange results!
None of the partitions were aligned correctly, and the partition type was all wrong: originally it came up as “OnTrack DM6” but after reformatting in Windows appeared as a Novell drive!

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 ? 379950 937327 570754815+ 72 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdf2 ? 82368 1027695 968014120 65 Novell Netware 386
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdf3 ? 913029 1858355 968014096 79 Unknown
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdf4 ? 1409025 1409052 27749+ d Unknown
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

A quick email to Wolferine support found the simple answer – treat the drive like you would a “superfloppy” and mount the whole device somewhere:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdf /mnt/hd

That works a treat and I get access to my new 20GB removable drive!
Here’s my mini-review. If you’re thinking of buying, Ritz Camera have it for $150 right now which seems like a good deal.
Be warned that the interface is very simple. There’s no indication of how much space has been used, but when backing up full CF cards it’s easy to calculate space used. It will warn when space is exhausted but there’s no way of deleting data without hooking it up to a PC. It beeps when the copy is completed. Even using USB 2.0, copying gigs of data takes a while so don’t rely on it as a primary storage device.
Battery life isn’t great. It uses an internal rechargable battery that lasts about an hour. Reading from a 1GB CF card can take more than 10 minutes so if you’re nowhere near a power plug you might be in trouble. You have to contact the manufacturer for replacement batteries.
In conclusion, it worked very well as storage for my 6GB of photos from Chicago and I’m happy with it!

DNS.. depend on 'em

In More ways malware damages internet infrastructure: DNS servers, Justin touches on the problems malware cause to local DNS servers and suggests people use the root servers directly. I had to do just that because the dns server on my dsl router is crap and would keep dying trying to talk to IOLBB’s server. I installed BIND as a cahing nameserver and everything worked fine.
Later I found 194.145.128.1 is an IOL dns server I can use but at least I know it’s easy to setup a DNS server on my machine.
God help us if a tool came out for every Windows owner to query the root servers easily. *gulp*

Debian Sarge, PHP4 and Apache2.. why do you persecute me?

Oh FFS! Has anyone had a problem with Apache2 and PHP4 on Debian Sarge/Testing? I have a stock install of it with nothing unusual AFAICT but Firefox keeps trying to download and save php files instead of processing them. All the config files seem to be correctly set up. Files in mods-enabled/ are fine.
Why am I upset? I added the wp-newblog.php to WPMU SVN tonight, imported a chunk of code from install.php so it’s a one-step process, but I can’t test this thing to see if it works! It’s here as a WPMU snapshot but it won’t work out of the box. It needs an entry in .htaccess first, and bug fixing.

I’m off to relax, it’s been a long day.. zzzz

Much Later… I finally got it working again. I tried dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin but it didn’t update the config file with this error:

Not replacing deleted config file /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

Following the clues from here I did the following:

apt-get remove –purge libapache2-mod-php4
apt-get remove –purge apache2
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4 phpmyadmin

PHPMyAdmin now works fine, and hopefully wpmu will too!

Can you hear me? Ping? Linux, ALSA, Via 82xx and 7.1 Surround Sound

I’ve finally got some sort of surround sound going, but only by clicking a “duplicate front” button in alsamixer. There are still 3 speakers that I can’t hear a peep from!
It wasn’t plain sailing in Windows either! For an age I couldn’t hear anything from the back-speakers but after replacing the 3->4 cable that came with the speakers with an old 3->3 cable plus another, it worked. I’ll look at it later again.
Here’s some links for reference:

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Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.