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Originally Posted by
c.wakeman
I have a problem that may not be fixable this evening. I can't, not for lack of trying for hours, find a male to male USB cable in the office. Can the connection be made with an ethernet cable?
No. Sorry I didn't realize this. You seemed confident the disk had USB connectivity and I didn't question it too deeply.
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I have done some reading about USB and my Buffalo HD and it seems that a USB connection won't work for two reasons. The first, the Buffalo HD USB is designed only to accept additional peripheral storage devices, not to connect the HD as a peripheral to a computer. (That wasn't exactly made clear in the product description; they mentioned that was an option, not the only use...) Two, USB A to USB A wouldn't support data transfer anyway and might short both the peripheral and the computer. Is that correct? I may have been searching using the wrong terms but I was amazed how little information I could find regarding male to male USB cables.
So at this point I have two options from what I can tell:
1) Return the Buffalo HD and purchase another HD that has proper USB connectivity.
That's what I'd do.
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2) Connect the Buffalo HD to the linux server using the available Linux ports.
You'll never be able to do a bare-metal backup that way.
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I tentatively attempted this last evening, but the gentoo liveCD bootup could never recognize the Buffalo HD using the fdisk -l; so I aborted the backup attempt.
It'll never recognize a network-only disk. Things on a network don't just appear because you plug them in (except for DHCP servers). It has to be used in other ways, and likely can't be done from a gentoo livecd since it's probably CIFS. Won't be trivial to do so on a full linux system, either. It won't be able to use it as a disk anyway, just as NAS.
The NAS features of the disk probably aren't very useful at all if you want to do a bare-metal backup.