CentOS - Aug 2008 - Help setting up external drive via Firewire

I got a WD 1TB My Book with eSATA/USB/Firewire400 connectivity to backup
data on a client Centos 5.1 machine.

USB 2.0 works fine out of the box but is rather slow, Nautilus predicts
about 1+ hour to fully backup just one day's worth of data or about 100GB.

So I was hoping Firewire would be faster, which is why we got the version
with all 3 interfaces to experiment with first.

Following the suggestions given to another user here
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37

I updated the system's kernel to the CentoPlus
[noob at localhost ~]$ uname -s -r
Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5

After a reboot, everything appears to work as expected, with the
motherboard's TI Firewire controller detected
[root at localhost ~]# lspci | grep 1394
04:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000
Controller (PHY/Link)

However, now I'm stuck as the system does not appear to detect the drive
when I connect the firewire cable and turn it on.
I've followed some of the suggestions to check the drive status like
"fdisk -l" but this only shows the drives already installed in the
system
"tail -f /var/log/dmesg" shows no new messages when the drive is
connected/powered on

So I'm at a loss as to what else I should be doing to get Firewire to work
and will appreciate any help on this.

Thanks!
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On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 12:59 AM, Noob Centos Admin
<centos.admin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I got a WD 1TB My Book with eSATA/USB/Firewire400 connectivity to backup
> data on a client Centos 5.1 machine.
>
> USB 2.0 works fine out of the box but is rather slow, Nautilus predicts
> about 1+ hour to fully backup just one day's worth of data or about
100GB.
>
> So I was hoping Firewire would be faster, which is why we got the version
> with all 3 interfaces to experiment with first.
>
> Following the suggestions given to another user here
>
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37
>
> I updated the system's kernel to the CentoPlus
> [noob at localhost ~]$ uname -s -r
> Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
If that is the output, you are not running the centosplus kernel. It
is supposed to be:

Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5.centos.plus

(See
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15788&forum=37 )

Akemi (nick toracat)

Noob Centos Admin wrote:
> I got a WD 1TB My Book with eSATA/USB/Firewire400 connectivity to backup 
> data on a client Centos 5.1 machine.
> 
> USB 2.0 works fine out of the box but is rather slow, Nautilus predicts 
> about 1+ hour to fully backup just one day's worth of data or about
100GB.
> 
> So I was hoping Firewire would be faster, which is why we got the 
> version with all 3 interfaces to experiment with first.
> 
> Following the suggestions given to another user here 
>
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37
>
<http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37>
> 
> I updated the system's kernel to the CentoPlus 
> [noob at localhost ~]$ uname -s -r
> Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
> 
> After a reboot, everything appears to work as expected, with the 
> motherboard's TI Firewire controller detected
> [root at localhost ~]# lspci | grep 1394
> 04:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 
> IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
> 
> However, now I'm stuck as the system does not appear to detect the
drive
> when I connect the firewire cable and turn it on.
> I've followed some of the suggestions to check the drive status like
> "fdisk -l" but this only shows the drives already installed in
the system
> "tail -f /var/log/dmesg" shows no new messages when the drive is 
> connected/powered on
> 
> So I'm at a loss as to what else I should be doing to get Firewire to 
> work and will appreciate any help on this.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
2 things jump out:
	1. As has already been pointed out that is not a Centos Plus kernel. 
Did you reboot after installing the new kernel? (You have to reboot for 
a kernel update in order to be running the new kernel).
	2. 1 hour to copy 100GB sounds like a very good speed. Obviously the 
eSATA interface will be the fastest as it will the the same as having it 
plugged directly into the SATA controller. For reference I recently 
copied 73GB from an internal SATA drive to an internal (software) raid0 
array (made up of 2 SATA disks), and that took 1.5hours.
Regards
Laurence