USB flash drives — the ubiquituous thingies that look a lot like keychains around people’s necks nowadays — are mounted much like SCSI disks in Linux. They are usually detected at boot up or when inserted, provided the proper modules are installed. So:
- Make sure the USB storage module is installed:
# modprobe usb-storage
- Once that’s done, and your USB drive is recognized, try to look up the device either in
dmesg or
# tail /var/log/messages
It should be something like “/dev/sda1“.
- Mount it the usual way:
# mount /dev/sdax /mnt/<your mountpoint>
- Or, if you want to avoid having to
sudo every time you access the drive, edit your /etc/fstab to contain the following:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat noauto,rw,user 0 0
Create a mount directory and chown it, then mount and unmount the drive the normal way.
00100111 01010100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 00110001 00110000 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00111010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00101110 00100111
A.K.A. “Los Baños”. Last time I’ve been there, it was way way back in 1996 — long time, longer story.
Now I’m back, but only for a while. I recently attended a training on content development for the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture in the International Rice Research Institute. A worthy endeavor, that one. So-called the “Farmer’s Internet” (don’t know about the styling but this one seems appropriate, given its grand scheme), the Open Academy is envisioned to leverage technology in reaching out to farmers in the countryside and bootstrapping Philippine agriculture to where it once was 30 years ago — at the top.
While it’s a worthy undertaking, it will need sustainability and the will to push it through. Besides that, the internet being as it is, it is going to entail some huge paradigm shifts. Policy makers are in for a surprise if they think that the net is the end-all and be-all of the country’s agricultural woes. They must not lose sight of the fact that technology, like everything else, requires perseverance.
I was specially struck by talks given by leading technology figures: about farmers being the most progressive class (not true: it’s the worker’s, actually); and serving what is needed using not high tech, not low tech, but the right tech.
Back from the training on content development for the Open Academy at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), UP Los Baños.
The workshops consisted of developing the e-learning component of the Open Academy. The participants were divided into two groups: the content writers and the web developers. In the web developers group, we evaluated the current site, laid out the site architecture, and designed the e-learning modules. We had to come up with a unified scheme that allows for expansion, usability and accessibility.
I pushed for a CSS-based and standards-compliant design, and sold the idea that this would facilitate modularity of not only the e-learning component but the whole site as well.
The workshop outputs are
here.
We will have to wait for the go-signal to retool the whole site.
(I had to leave for a few days and settle accountabilities at my former workplace.)
I’m going to be the site maintainer of the
Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture. So I got me root access, and did the usual stuff: disabled root logins, added my own account, and added it to the
sudoers file.
The Open Academy server, opapa, has
vsftpd for uploading web files. Nice. I created a non-shell account that can log on to FTP. This is for files that are set for publication.
The site is a bit rough, though. No matter, it is up for a redesign anyway.
Also checked for open ports in opapa. None that can’t be plugged.
Back to surveying the network. Tomorrow, I’m off to training.
