Installing Zip Drive in RH8

[Buzza24]

Hello,

I would like to install a Iomega Zip Drive 100mb Parrallel.

How do i do it?
and please don't send me to a link, because i have seen a couple and they are hard for me to understand.

thanks

[Calum]

'please don't send me to a link'? that narrows it down a bit, doesn't it?

what if all *your* links have been oops because you suck at searching, but all our links kick ass and are easy because we spend our lives on the net looking for geeky tutorials? hmm? THEN would you go to one of our links, hMm? would you? hmm? would you?

[Void Main]

You should be able to just:

# modprobe ppa
# service kudzu start

The kudzu service should add an entry into your /etc/fstab for mounting "/dev/sda4" (your ZIP drive) to the "/mnt/zip" mount point. If it doesn't the entry would look something like this:

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/dev/sda4               /mnt/zip                auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


You may or may not have to add "/sbin/modprobe ppa" to one of your startup scripts (at the end of "/etc/rc.local" is a good place if needed). Now I actually have a real SCSI card that uses /dev/sda? devices so my ZIP drive shows up on /dev/hdb4.

[Buzza24]

'please don't send me to a link'? that narrows it down a bit, doesn't it?

what if all *your* links have been oops because you suck at searching, but all our links kick ass and are easy because we spend our lives on the net looking for geeky tutorials? hmm? THEN would you go to one of our links, hMm? would you? hmm? would you?

Well Ok then I would like some of ur links then.

[Void Main]

Well Ok then I would like some of ur links then.

I take it my instructions did not work for you?

[Calum]

Well Ok then I would like some of ur links then.

well, this link is best, because void main's help is usually spot on.

coincidentally i am planning on installing a parallel port zip100 drive in red hat 8 soon too, and i found some info at http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/ZIP-Drive-2.html and http://www.iomega.com/support/documents/10661.html however i have not yet tried to install it so i can't tell you how much use they will be. i will post again once i have tried and am successful to say how i did it.

[Void Main]

OMG, that Iomega link is funny. It was obviously written by someone who has no actual clue about Linux/UNIX. This line is the funniest:

You must be logged into the root and not as SU (shared user).

[Doogee]

isnt su "switch user" and yes you would have to be "su -" maybe thats what that no0b means?

[Void Main]

To be honest I don't really know what they mean by that sentence. There is no such thing as "SU" in Linux. There is a command "su" (lower case) which I believe originally stood for "substitute user" although many people today (including me) refer to it as "switch user". Some people believe it is short for "super user" because it allows you to become the all powerful "root" user but that just doesn't make any sense, there should be some action in a command name (switch or substitute fill that bill).

Now the line I quoted says "you must be logged into the root". That's like saying "you must be logged into the Administrator" in NT/2K/etc. WTH is that supposed to mean? Now if they said "you must be logged in as root" then it would make sense. Now the rest of the sentence "instead of the SU (shared user)" just plain baffles me.

The only thing I can figure is that they meant to say "You must log in as root rather than switching to root using the 'su' command", but that isn't even true. There is no reason for you to log in as root so I just don't get it. That's just one of several things that are just plain wrong with the page. But I digress, I'm certainly not qualified to criticize others on grammar, although this is more a technical competency issue IMHO.

[Calum]

ok, well i just got my zip drive working in red hat 8 and here's how i did it:

plug the zip drive into the parallel port, switch it on and put a zip disk in it.

now as root do:

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modprobe ppa
modprobe vfat

at this point in the game i was following the iomega instructions, till i noticed thay have a real capital letters problem. now i did mkdir /mnt/zip and mounted the drive by doing mount -t hfs /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip

you will notice the mount type is hfs. i am using a macintosh zip disk. if i had been using a 'pc' zip disk, i would have used 'vfat' instead of 'hfs'. i have not yet figured out how to get linux to automatically deduce whether the zip disk if vfat or hfs upon mounting. also the hfs zip disks seem to have some issue where you can't delete what's on the disk. i haven't looked into this yet, but i plan to reformat all my zip disks as vfat and see if that helps, using formatfd, if it will work on a zip disk.

any ideas or hints, people?

edit: unless you want to do this every time you want to use the zip disk, it is necessary to put the modprobe bits in a place where they will be executed upon bootup. can somebody please tell me where the best place would be for this? also, i did put a line into /etc/fstab for the zip drive but i noticed when i next booted up that the line had gone, and the directory /mnt/zip no longer existed. is this something weird red hat has done? if so, i suspect the modprobes must be done at a point during bootup before red hat helpfully updates the fstab. am i right? if so, where is this place?

[Void Main]

The "kudzu" service automatically updates your /etc/fstab. Just add "/sbin/modprobe ppa" to the end of your /etc/rc.sysinit script and you should be all set. Adding it there will ensure the module is loaded before the kudzu service runs. You might wish to customize your /etc/fstab entry and not have kudzu mess with it. If so, edit your /etc/fstab where you should find an entry for your zip drive. You should notice the word "kudzu" in the options for your zip drive line. Remove the keyword "kudzu" and the preceding comma (,) which should cause kudzu to ignore this line in the future.

There is a Linux tool on Iomega's web site that will allow you to format the disks:

http://www.iomega.com/software/linuxtools.html

but I would not suggest using it, it's really old and appears to be written by a Windows person. I would suggest using "mzip" which is an "mtools" utility and you probably already have it installed. Just add this to your /etc/mtools.conf file:

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drive z: file="/dev/sda4" exclusive


Then you don't have to mount the disk or have it in your /etc/fstab. You can use the mtools to manipulate your disks using dos-like commands. e.g.:

$ mdir z:
$ mcopy somefile z:
$ mdel z:somefile
$ mzip -w (remove write protect)
$ mzip -e (eject disk)
etc

Other mtools commands:
mattrib mbadblocks mcd mcopy mdel mdeltree mdir mdu mformat minfo mkmanifest mlabel mmd mmount mmove mrd mren mtoolstest mtype

I also have mine set up to automount the zip disk whenever a process tries to access it (like a "cd /zip" would automatically mount the disk or an "ls /zip" would automatically mount it and display a directory listing). After one minute of no activity it would unmount. For more info see these man pages: autofs (8), autofs (5), automount, auto.master

Here is a copy of my /etc/auto.master:

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# $Id: auto.master,v 1.2 1997/10/06 21:52:03 hpa Exp $
# Sample auto.master file
# Format of this file:
# mountpoint map options
# For details of the format look at autofs(8).
/misc   /etc/auto.misc  --timeout=60


Here is a copy of my /etc/auto.misc:

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# $Id: auto.misc,v 1.2 1997/10/06 21:52:04 hpa Exp $
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# Details may be found in the autofs(5) manpage

cd              -fstype=iso9660,ro,nosuid,nodev :/dev/cdrom
zip             -fstype=vfat            :/dev/sda4

# the following entries are samples to pique your imagination
#linux          -ro,soft,intr           ftp.example.org:/pub/linux
#boot           -fstype=ext2            :/dev/hda1
#floppy         -fstype=auto            :/dev/fd0
#floppy         -fstype=ext2            :/dev/fd0
#e2floppy       -fstype=ext2            :/dev/fd0
#removable      -fstype=ext2            :/dev/hdd


Make sure the autofs service is enabled and started:

# chkconfig autofs on
# service autofs restart

I have a symbolic link that points to /misc/zip:

# ln -s /misc/zip /zip

so whenever I try and access /zip it mounts the zip disk automatically as mentioned. You could skip the symbolic link and just use "/misc/zip" directly. Note, you will not see a "/misc/zip" directory if you do an "ls /misc", it's magic voodoo. :)

So I have 3 different ways of accessing my zip drive. I can manually mount it as I have an entry in my /etc/fstab, I can just have it automount by accessing it via my /zip directory, or I can access it via mtools. 4 ways if you count that stupid Iomegaware utility. Maybe this should become the next Red Hat 8.0 tip?

[Calum]

void main that is fantastic! thanks for the info.

edit: any thoughts on how to make it so i can mount both types of filesystem on this zip drive? is it allowed to have two entries for /dev/sda4 in fstab with different filesystem types? i thought about having two scripts for mounting it with the two different filesystem types, so i don't have to type the whole mounting line each time.

[Void Main]

If you use the autofs which is my favorite you can actually use "-fstype=auto" in your /etc/auto.misc. Also I have dropped my timeout down to 5 seconds in my /etc/auto.master. Works like a champ. I don't have any hfs disks to test but it should work.

Also you should be able to use "auto" instead of vfat in your /etc/fstab. Then just "mount /mountpoint" and it should mount with the proper file system driver. Likewise if you don't have an entry in /etc/fstab and you mount manually it should automatically detect the file system type if you do not specify a "-t" option. Let me know if I am wrong.

[Calum]

well i tried to use 'auto' in fstab by copying the line from my floppy drive. i think the line looked like:

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip auto defaults,users,exec,noauto 0 0

and basically it didn't work, for some reason. i assumed that it was something to do with the device not supporting 'auto' as a type or perhaps 'hfs' was not one of the filesystems checked for if 'auto' is specified. whatever i was just guessing, anyway, i have not tried that autofs thing, as i don't like automounters, however if i have it set to 5 seconds, maybe that will be good enough to be transparent. maybe i could put it down to 1 or 2 seconds...

[Void Main]

i have not tried that autofs thing, as i don't like automounters, however if i have it set to 5 seconds, maybe that will be good enough to be transparent. maybe i could put it down to 1 or 2 seconds...

But it's not like the automounters that you do not like (I believe). That is, it doesn't automount when you stick the disk in (which I also do not like). You have to try and access the mount point before it automatically mounts. It will stay mounted until nothing is using the mount point (and the timeout period has passed). So let's say you have a bash shell open and you are just "cd'ed" into the mount directory but are not running any other apps. The disk will stay mounted until you change directory to some directory other than under the mount point, or close your shell (any situation that would cause the disk not to be umountable under normal mount/unmount procedures).

You can still use your manual method of mounting even if you have the autofs configured to mount it, just set up different mount points. For instance when I manually mount I mount under "/mnt/zip", when I want it to automount I access it through my symlink "/zip".