[geeks] DL380 does not see external USB drive

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 03:30:25PM -0400, Ido Dubrawsky wrote:
>I've got a DL380 running Ubuntu Server 8.04 which does not see any
>external USB drives.  I'm trying to attach a 250GB external USB drive to
>backup the VMware images in my lab and when I plug the drive into the
>USB ports in the back I see the following message in dmesg:

That's because device support in Ubuntu, to be polite, sucks.

After having so many things I could not deal with be broken, security
fixes people forgot to back port, to 8.04 etc, I made the mistake of
going to 9.04 right after it came out.

It seems that the people who tested it did not have IDE optical drives,
or netbooks. It never worked with IDE optical drives at all, and it
would not boot on a netbook.

Somewhere along the way Ubuntu came out with a Netbook 9.04 disk, which ONLY
boots on netbooks. Not on a "real" computer, and not in a virtual machine.

Then I ended up with a system that would go off into outer space in 3 days, 
later I updated it and it would last 1 day, and so on. 

Now it works, and one machine was up for an entire month before I rebooted
it due to fixes. The other one only stayed up for a week, again due to fixes.

My advice to you is to after the usual backups, etc, install 9.04, update your
/etc/apt/sources.list file to include the correct repositories and do a 
massive update of everything to the latest level, especially the kernel.

Then you may actually have something that works.

Whatever you do, do not use the compatibility system for Windows device drivers
for WiFi cards. It works, at least for a few hours. :-(

Oh, and BTW, the CIFS client (for mounting SMB shares as file systems) is not
part of the SAMBA package and is not installed by default. If you try to mount
a CIFS/SAMBA share without it, you get a really weird generic message which is
almost impossible to figure out/STFW.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM