usb advice

[Jeff D. Hamann]

FreeBSD-ers,

I'm putting together a new amd64 system and would like to get some
feedback on using USB for devices. I have a machine with six USB ports
(two on the front) and I would like to use them much as I would on a
windows machine. The machine will sit (mostly) as a headless server and
only rarely will I need to connect directly to the machine (mostly I will
connect using SSH). When I do connect directly, I would love to be able to
simply plug in a mouse and keyboard into the two ports on the front of the
machine (automount?) and then yank them out when I'm done with my chores.
Is this even possible?

More importantly, I would like to utilize a USB hard drive connection
(maybe one of those hard drive cases for laptops) for creating a nightly
backup of the data on my hard drive. I could store much more data than
either tape drive of DVD drive and could rotate a couple of disks for
additional security. Can FreeBSD handle this or would I seimply need to
install the addtional hard drive within the machine itself and use it as a
backup? This isn't really an option since the backup would need to go off
site (vault storage).

I get the feeling that USB support on FreeBSD isn't grand and I'm working
with FreeBSD 6.0BETA4 right now and when I tried to automount a USB flash
drive, the machine rebooted when I pulled the drive out of the port.

Comments?

Jeff.


-- 
Jeff D. Hamann
Forest Informatics, Inc.
PO Box 1421
Corvallis, Oregon 97339-1421
phone 541-754-1428
fax 541-752-0288
jeff.hamann at forestinformatics.com
www.forestinformatics.com