Many of as are using wget as a quick command line download tool to fetch data from the web using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. We usually pick download mirror closest to our location in hope for better download speed, start wget and hoping for the best. Aria2 download tool offers an alternative solution to wget with increased potential for greater download speed by downloading from more than one source in the single session.

Along the usual protocols supported by wget aria2 also offers download resume and additional download options using torrents, magnet URIs and metalinks. This article explores some aria2 download techniques which potentially could ease wget's work load.

Here is a short tip on how to automatically submit a HTML form using a Linux command line and perl script. For this example we would need a WWW::Mechanize perl module and some basic PHP website. Let's start with simple PHP website. The website will consist of two files:

form.php:

<form action="submit.php" method="post">
First Name: <input name="fname" type="text" />
Last Name: <input name="lname" type="text" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

Question:

My Debian (up to date) system will automount USB pen drives on the fly, but not a 1 Tb external USB drive (Iomega), which will mount but it has to be attached before booting. How to I change the behaviour for the Iomega usb large drive so I can mount it after the system is up? Thanks.

Answer:

If your 1 Tb external USB drive mounts when it is attached before booting you may have a line in your /etc/fstab configuration file which mounts it during the boot time. If this is the case and you plug in your external USB drive after the boot, execute as a root user:

# mount -a

This will mount all devices which are not currently mounted, including your Iomega USB drive.

However, this may not be the most reliable solution since the base device file name for your drive can be different every time you plugin your USB disk. Since you have already mentioned that you are using other USB pen drives, your base device file name for your Iomega USB disk can be anything like: /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdd1 or /dev/sdXn .

I have exactly the same problem with my external WD USB drive as it mounts automatically in Fedora but not in Debian. Therefore, I recommend use autofs. autofs is very simple a neat solution. It takes little bit of configuration but its worth it !

Make USB device base name permanent

To avoid any confusion whether base name for your USB block device is /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdd1 or /dev/sdXn we make it permanently /dev/Iomega anytime you plug it in. This can be done with help of udev device manager. You should have udev already installed on your system, otherwise install it with:

# apt-get install udev

Next, search for a current base name of your external USB disk using fdisk command:

# fdisk -l

This will return something like this:

OUTPUT:

Disk /dev/sdc: 2000.3 GB, 2000396746752 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x001425a0

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1      243201  1953512001    b  W95 FAT32

Where the base name for your external USB device is /dev/sdc. Next, use udevinfo command with /dev/sdc as an argument to get model attribute:

$ udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sdc/ | grep model
    ATTRS{model}=="Ext HDD 1021    "

Now, that we have model attribute, we can add it to /etc/udev/rules.d/custom.rules by following line:

SUBSYSTEM=="scsi", ATTRS{model}=="Ext HDD 1021    ", SYMLINK+="Iomega%n"

At this point all we need to do is restart udev device manager: