This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and I recall very many long hours of hair pulling making USB scanners and Windows 98 work years ago. Fortunately though, the driver cd was included in the bag their friend had passed along. The install process went smoothly, but there was one little detail missing.
Tag: USB
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Virtualbox virtualization open source availability
This last week virtualbox announced that they have released a version of their virtualization software as open source. There is a pay version as well with more features. (*read on for features available in the full version.)
While I appreciate them making the core virtualization open source and currently they are likely the most advanced open source virtualization software out there… it is a bit disappointing to see some of the really juicy features in the non-open source version. However, it should be noted that the full version is free for personal use or evaluation.
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VMware guest unable to access USB devices
I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
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Firewire/USB card and ethernet incompatibilities on Ubuntu 6.06
I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.
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More linux software raid fun
OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. First it was because “you don’t want to do software raid” and I didn’t have a card to support hardware raid, then when I first was seeing people raving about how good linux software raid is, I didn’t have two free drives of equal size to work with. Well, the other day in working towards a storage system for a client I’ve got an ubuntu system (dapper 6.06.1) setup with software raid and wanted to poke and prod and test some things out before it goes into a useful role.
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Multiple Apple updates as Mac goes to version 10.4.8
Apple is fixing 15 security flaws with the 10.4.8 version upgrade of Mac OS X. (There is a second update as well…. Security Update 2006-006). In typical fashion there are a bundle of issues in these updates. Several address remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
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Skype and USB phones….
I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I have hooked up to the PC fell back in the corner beside the desk and I haven’t dug it out in quite a while. A few weeks ago though my Dad discovered Skype and ordered a cheap ($17) “phone” that plugs into the usb port of the pc and can be used with skype and a variety of other services. (in fact, it works as a generic usb sound card so… there might be other possibilities for using it to record wav files directly, etc.)
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Saving you from yourself or specifying which index file to use with apache
As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php that serves up the USUAL home page. So, for about an hour after my slipup…. the main page for this site showed a page full of links to admin logins/stat monitors, google utilities, etc. etc. (At least I’m not dumb enough to have put in password information.) Anyway…. I thought, how should I protect myself from doing that again? .htaccess is the answer….
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Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly recall
USB thumb drives seem fairly simple, nothing hazardous…. but Lexar has recalled several models of the Firefly series as well as the JumpDrive Secure II, 1GB model. The affected Firefly sizes are… 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB. They apparently have a “risk of burns to consumers and property damage.” I would assume the risk is ONLY when they’re plugged in to a USB port. I wonder if it has to do with the circuit for the LED light. USB provides 5 volts power and LED’s can be quite particular about getting the exact voltage needed. In a LED circuit you usually have a resistor to bleed off the un-necessary voltage. Once I built a light with about 18 white LED’s and I ran into a “design failure” in my first attempt (didn’t take into account the wattage rating for the LED.) and so the first mockup had a smoking resistor.
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Intelliadmin – free disable usb storage tool
For Windows system administrators that have sweated over the perils of usb drives and memory sticks…. Intelliadmin has a tool for you. It’s a small utility that will allow to remotely disable usb drives over the LAN. It won’t affect usb mice/keyboards – just usb storage. So, if your network security policy doesn’t like USB storage you can easily use this to make sure those devices don’t work on plugin.