How to Unpoison a Slug?

[fizze]

For everyone that’s using a USB stick as a main unsling (root) device:
Did you create the “magic” .ext3flash device in the root directory?

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/Ext3flash

This causes unslung to cease swap, and to tie down on disk-wear-and-tear.
Also, if you have a HDD attached as source for MP3s, you can create a swap file rather easily on the HDD. But thats not even necessary for firefly, afaik.

[richdunlop]

@fizze wrote:

For everyone that’s using a USB stick as a main unsling (root) device:
Did you create the “magic” .ext3flash device in the root directory?

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Unslung/Ext3flash

This causes unslung to cease swap, and to tie down on disk-wear-and-tear.
Also, if you have a HDD attached as source for MP3s, you can create a swap file rather easily on the HDD. But thats not even necessary for firefly, afaik.

Great advice fizze! The wiki nslu2 build guide does direct people to that Ext3flash article in addition to explaining how to move Firefly’s db off of the memory stick to reduce writes. However not everyone follows the wiki build guide closely… I’ll add emphasis to the point…

[davesanti]

I did that on my main Slug…

The one with the I/O problems is the newly resurrected one I havent done that yet.. bu there is no use on it.

Dave

[sansp00]

I too tried it … Even added a swapfile on disk. The slug, as soon as I would start Twonky, would freeze. Same with Firefly.

Patrick S.

[fizze]

Weird. Just out of curiosity, how big is your swap file?
Your HDs are ext2/3 formatted?

I’ve experienced such behaviour too, but this was due to heavy load. After a couple of minutes it came back.

Extremely behaviour like you I only experienced back in the day when I had unsling to an ext2/3 USB stick, and attached a NTFS hard drive…..

[davesanti]

Final note:

I reflashed the Slug and unslung to a new Sony stick. It worked fine and I had no problem loading FF to it..

Maybe the Kingston was crap to begin with.

Dave

[sansp00]

Well fizze, you described my setup perfectly, usb ext stick and ntfs hdd.
I know ntfs is not recommended, but nor fat or ext where an option. But I did not read anything specific preventing such a setup to freeze (it was more in terms of days in my case).
Anyway, got rid of the flash and caved in to move to ext hdd 😳
Lost the goal I wanted to achieve of being able to take the hdd at someone else’s place and just plug it in and transfer 🙁 But gain stability …

Patrick S.

[fizze]

I know exactly what you’re going through 😉
Convert to ext2/3 and then your slug will be rock-solid-stable.

Besides, you can add a small FAT partition and host fs-driver.org’s win32 ext2/3 drivers on there. Or, these days, just download them on-the-fly.
I’ve done so myself a couple of times, it works without a reboot in windows 🙂

Just be sure to unmount the drive in windows, or else the poor guy will have a “phantom” drive letter sitting around when you unplug the HD.

[davesanti]

For me the reason I unslung to flash was to stop the Slug from poking at the HDD when it was asleep. I have a Maxtor One Touch 3. It will spin down after aa period of inactivity. I had the system unslung to it initially and it seemed that it wasn’t spinning down as it should.

Can anyone comment on this.. Should the Slug be poking at the HDD when nothing is happening.

Dave

[sansp00]

I’ve seen a load of info on this, but never actually read it in a proper fashion. I’ve seen script an arm and leg long to mess with the feature. Aside FF, what were you running on the slug ? Did it poke the swap ?
I have Western Digitals on my slug and I did not want to bother looking for the custom crap needed to “possibly” make it work.
Patrick S.

[Author]

Posts