USB Storage support to Thin Clients.

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 16:24 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2006 2:51 pm, Rick Stevens said:
> > On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 23:18 +0300, davut wrote:
> >> Thanks for reply. I have HPT5525 Thin
> >> Client(http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-321959-89307-338927-89307-500797.html).
> >> Linux 2.4 running on it, and  XFCE 3.X Desktop Manager running on it.
> >> Unfortunately, XFCE hasn't a dropdown menu or secondary window about
> >> local devices or USB disk.
> >
> > I haven't used XFCE in a LONG time.  I'd have to dig it up on one of my
> > old machines.
> >
> >> On thin client's OS without connect to server's X server, When I plugged
> >> the USB disk to thin client, I tried as a root user #mount /dev/sda1
> >> /mnt/usb but got an error that "/dev/sda1 not found". There isn't sda
> >> device at system. So, I couldn't use USB disk via mount it on console.
> >> Then, I connect to the server's X server.  I plugged USB disk to thin
> >> client, but I could not see /dev/sda on system(on server). What can I do?
> >
> > Ah, humm, kernel 2.4.  You may need to "modprobe usb-storage" to force
> > the USB storage module to load up.  Then plugging in your USB drive
> > should show up.  So:
> >
> > 	1. Unplug the drive
> > 	2. As root, "modprobe usb-storage"
> > 	3. Plug the drive back in
> 
> At what point might the command  hotplug usb  be used? Was that after the 2.4
> kernel?

Hotplug was around in later 2.4 kernels but it was problematic.  In some
cases it worked a treat, in others it was marginal to say the least.

> > Once that's done, take a look at the output of "dmesg" and see if the
> > drive was recognized.  If it was, you can either add the "modprobe
> > usb-storage" command to the end of the /etc/rc.d/rc.local script or add
> > a line to /etc/modules.conf like:
> >
> > 	alias scsi_hostadapter usb-storage
> >
> > which should force the module to load.  You may also want to add a line
> > to /etc/auto.misc to do the automount when the drive shows up, e.g.
> >
> > 	usbdisk            -fstype=ext2            :/dev/sda1
> >
> > This assumes that the /mnt/usbdisk directory exists.
> >

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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