Unfortunately no one can be told what fun_plug is - you have to see it for yourself.
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What are the a4 and b4 partitions on the two drives used for? I've search the forums but cannot find a specific thread.
HD_a2 and HD_b2 are available via SMB, but the a4 and b4 sections are not. Probably a stupid question but I've been wondering this since I got the unit.
Thanks
Last edited by bound4h (2010-11-03 16:05:25)
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Was curious about that myself.
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The firmware uses those partitions.
There are hidden directories in there. On my HD_a4 I have .lpd and .systemfile.
.lpd is for the printer spool files. If you have and use a printer attached to the USB port, the printer daemon queues up the print jobs here.
.systemfile seems to hold a collection of work and config files for various things, like ftp logs, plug-and-play databases and what looks like security certificates.
Anyway, you can explore yourself: ls -a to list hidden files.
If you have two disks, you would have an HD_b4 as well. On my system, the print spool is only on HD_a4, which makes sense. And some of the other files appear on both.
On my system, both disks are 1TB and the size of the HD_?4 partitions are both 487M. I don't know if the firmware sets the size based on a percentage of the overall disk size, or uses some bounded fixed amount.
I think that some of the files are placed there as part of the formatting process. Not sure if a reboot does anything with them.
Although you *could* probably use the space in those partitions for something, I don't bother and I'm not sure I'd say it is a good idea. The firmware could do anything with those partitions.
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Looking at the files, it seems it is used as semi-permanent temporary storeage for things like the UPNP cache, print spooler, etc. So, essentially, system files. It makes sense to use a portion of the HDD since otherwise RAM (and/or RAM disk) would have to be used.
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Both my NAS units allocated the same amount of space so I suspect it is hardwired into the firmware as an exact size since one NAS has 2x1TB HDD's and the other has 2x1.5TB HDD's.
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Ok thanks, I took a look myself with ls -al and I think I'm seeing the same files as you are.
What is interesting is that some tutorials are having users cd to /mnt/HD_a4 and mkdir packages to download all of Fonz's packages. One example here: http://www.horto.ca/?p=10. Just search for HD_a4.
Doesn't seem to reliable to put your packages there.
Thanks for clearing that up anyway, I've always been wondering.
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Yeah, I agree. You could run out of space in that partition, which could hurt the print spooler. Perhaps they thought that HD_a4 would be a good "temp" space and figured that they didn't care about the package files after they were installed.
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I dono, half a Gig seems a bit excessive to me.
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