HP Compaq T5125 USB issue

[Norphy]

I bought a few Compaq T5125 thin clients a while back and have just had an issue pointed out with them.

 

I'm trying to save to a USB flash drive with them. You plug the flash drive into a USB port, it gets detected by the Linux OS and mounted. You can browse to where ever you want to go on it and open files. However when you try to save to the file, it reports that the USB is full despite it having plenty of space on it.

 

This doesn't happen when using the same flash drive and the MS RDP client on a Windows XP machine, it also doesn't happen with the CE based thin clients. It doesn't happen with the linux based 2X OS either but that has a much more serious problem.

 

I've tried updating the OS on the HP box, no difference. I even tried calling HP support but they fobbed me off. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

Cheers,

 

Norphy

[Geoff]

Is anything listed in 'dmesg' output when you use the USB drive?

[Norphy]

The only seemingly relevant messages are:

 

WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured

USB Mass Storage device found at 2

USB Mass Storage support registered

 

Under that, it says

 

EXT3-fs: Unrecognised mount option umask

VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev sd(8,1).

[Ric_]

Have you tried upgrading the firmware?

[Geoff]

EXT3-fs: Unrecognised mount option umask

VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev sd(8,1).

 

Can you post the output from 'mount' and the contents of /etc/fstab please?

[Norphy]

Have you tried upgrading the firmware?

 

Yup, if anything this made it worse.

 

Can you post the output from 'mount' and the contents of /etc/fstab please?

 

Mount:

 

/dev/hda2 on / type squashfs (ro)

none on /proc type proc (rw)

/dev/hda3 on /mnt type ext2 (rw,sync)

/dev/hda1 on /boot type 2 ext2 (ro,sync)

none on /var type ramfs (rw)

none on /dev type ramfs (rw)

none on /tmp type ramfs (rw)

/dev/loop0 on /var/spool/lpd type ext2 (rw)

usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)

none on /mnt/cdrom

/dev/sda1 on /mnt/usb type vfat (rw)

 

Contents of fstab:

 

/dev/hda2 / squashfs defaults 0 0

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0

 

Cheers

[Ric_]

@Norphy: The message you received earlier appears to be normal (I get that on mine too). I am using the most up to date firmware IIRC (with the German train theme ).

 

USB drive access seems fine for me - both read and write. If you are using Citrix, make sure you don't have a policy in place to disable writing to removable media.

 

[Geoff]

I can't see anything wrong from the Linux side of things. It's got the usb disk setup right and it's mounted to read write too. That is of course assuming it's formated as FAT32?

[Norphy]

Yep

 

Like I say, the stick works perfectly on MS RDP clients. I've also tried multiple memory sticks plus a CF card+reader, the same happens each time. The issue happens with the machine of the person who originally reported plus the spare I'm using to troubleshoot this with.

 

I've tried with FAT16 and FAT32 formatted sticks. The only thing in common here is that all of the memory devices I tried were Kingston. I'll see if I can find another brand of stick, I should have one knocking around somewhere....

 

FWIW, I'm not using Citrix, just plain Terminal Services. Ric, can you just confirm the version of the firmware you're running? I have L1ST3158.

[Norphy]

OK, this just got stranger.

 

These things by default start up with the HP Connection Administrator which is a front end for rdesktop. It looks virtually identical to the MS RDP client that comes with Windows CE thin clients. But anyway....

 

For local drive sharing, it is set up to look for drives an area called /tmp/shared. There is some kind of voodoo which waits for a USB drive to be mounted and as soon as it is, it creates a shortcut in there to /mnt/usbx, x being the number of the USB drive. When the RDP client is set to map to this area, you can read the contents of the USB drive but not write to them. However, tell it to map to /mnt or to /mnt/usbx, it works perfectly. The downside of this is that they will see everything else which exists in /mnt too so it isn't a solution I'd want to use for students.

 

Anyway, that is how I eventually managed to resolve this. The other solution that I tried was to boot Thinstation from a USB key. This worked but the performance of the thin client suffered as the VIA VGA driver included with Thinstation doesn't work properly (general corruption) and the the Generic VESA one is just incredibly slow.

[Geoff]

There is some kind of voodoo which waits for a USB drive to be mounted and as soon as it is, it creates a shortcut in there to /mnt/usbx, x being the number of the USB drive.

 

Sounds like USB Hotplugging.

 

This worked but the performance of the thin client suffered as the VIA VGA driver included with Thinstation doesn't work properly (general corruption) and the the Generic VESA one is just incredibly slow.

 

What about using Framebuffer?

[CyberNerd]

T5125 uses S3 video driver, try thinstation with xorg6-s3 driver rather

than xorg6-via.

TS-O-Matic will compile everything for you on the sire:

http://www.thinstation.org/

 

ref:http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-321959-89307-338927-89307-472257.html

[Norphy]

I've been compiling Thinstation on a Linux server that I'm using for Zimbra atm. I tried it with all three S3 drivers but when I booted a Thinstation image with the S3 drivers, the graphics chip didn't get detected and rdesktop wouldn't start. The only ones it would start with were the VIA and the Generic VESA ones.

 

TS-O-Matic doesn't work here, it always times out after I try to download the build.

[Ric_]

@Norphy: If I get chance, I will try it using RDP for you. From what I can remember though, the mapping on mine maps to /mnt/usbx not /mnt/share/usbx. I take it that you have checked the permissions on the /mnt/share directory (and the usbx subfolder when created)?

 

IIRC, you are using the same firmware as me. It's the most recent one, isn't it (with the German train theme )? You could try reloading the firmware if you have never updated it (perhaps there is a dodgy batch or something). It's dead easy to do... ironically you use a USB drive

[Norphy]

Yeah, I've already updated the firmware, the firmware they were shipped with was out of date.

 

Still, it's not too important so please don't put yourself out. It's only staff that are using the HP thin clients, all of the students are still using IGEL ones booting with 2X.