-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Good afternoon, everyone...
Once I ignored the instructions from Iomega (and consequently from Mandrake) and simply began treating an Iomega Zip Disk drive as I would any other drive with removable media, the process of formatting and using a Zip Disk (with the user and group ID's set to where anyone on the local network is given access) the rest of it is a piece of cake, with only one possible exception. Here is a bit of mini-documentation I just wrote on the fly to explain how this works, if you're having problems. GIVEN: Your Iomega Zip Disk is recognized by your hardware BIOS as an ATAPI drive, i.e., it is not a parallel Iomega Zip Disk, and (thanks to Dan) make certain it is the Master on the Secondary IDE chain, not the Slave). The quickest easiest way to detect that you are set up properly from a hardware standpoint is that it will appear during a normal boot-up in the BIOS statement on the screen as an ATAPI device and be thus recognized as an Iomega Zip Disk. Woe to ye who try to enter from any other gate, because hell is your destination. I have managed to get parallel Zip Disks working under Red Hat, but have repeatedly been defied by the same attempts under Mandrake 8.2 and upward. Go figure. ;-) Once you have your Zip drive established in the BIOS, you have but one other hurdle to pass-- mounting the drive. [HINT] If you look in the /dev directory, you should see an entry for it. Mine happens to be /dev/hdd because I have two hard disks already mounted and a SCSI Jazz drive to boot. Yours may differ. If you're really lucky and Santa is your friend, you may even find it already mounted as a Zip drive, but I've never seen it happen. After you have typed "mount /dev/xxx /zip" or something to that effect, type "mount" and see how Linux *thinks* the drive is formatted, because I have encountered several instances where the drive is falsely detected as having a vfat format, which sometimes is the mount default, even though the disk is actually formatted as ext2. If that happens, umount the drive and t ype mount - -t ext2(3) /dev/hdd /zip (or whatever) if you're *certain* the drive is formatted as ext2/3. Otherwise format it, making certain it is *not* mounted thus: mke2fs /dev/xxx with xxx being the file in the /dev directory which points to your zip disk. Then mount the drive again. You're halfway home already. Now comes the truly *ugly* part. Chmod the directory for your zip disk to your personal best choice, remembering to also chown it to your user name. Otherwise you won't be able to write files to it, the problem I was encountering. Incredibly enough, you can't perform that last step with the disk formatted as vfat. In fact, you can't even share the drive under Samba as vfat, so ext(x) is your friend. You do this thus: chown username:username /zip and chmod 770 /zip Presto! Anyone inside the network can use it. One good substitution is to share the drive through Samba, using a username and password to authenticate who is connecting to the drive. It's *way* better than the example I just gave, but I *trust* my firewall. 8-) Now, having unzipped my brain box in front of the entire world, let's see what, if anything, I've missed in my mini-documentation regarding Zip Disks. Dave - -- Dave Laird ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 01/02/2003 Music Calendar & Website: http://www.kharma.net/calendar.html Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net An automatic & random thought For the Minute: The grass is always greener on the other side of your sunglasses. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+JzWyaE1ENZP1A28RAtb2AJ4jV6qnGHXQLzm4FM0hM7J5kHfxhQCgj7YI bIONiWkfwmxM0bTGsrbFgqY= =0PT+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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