|
Meanwhile, the photo processing software (Kodak Easyshare) is looking for one of those partitions during it's boot process, and boots without seeing the required drive, leaving it pretty much useless. So the disk is OK to WinXP either thru the hub or when directly connected, but OK to PM 8 only when connected directly to a USB port. This item worked pretty much as advertised in my usage. This brings up a boot issue. If the disk is attached directly to a USB hub, PM8 sees all partitions correctly. Once the firewall has completely installed (usually last), all USB devices show and connect immediately. Once the drive is recognized, windows begins the partition recognition process, which takes approximately 1-2 minutes.
PM8 sees the USB disk (my backup disk) as totally bad in it's partition table. This version came out shortly after WinXP came on the scene, and is no longer supported by Norton.
The hub screen comes up quickly, showing no devices attached, as the hub can't get to the network until the firewall is up. Now, when I need the photo software, it is available thru a desktop icon.2) The second issue is with Partition Magic 8.0.
It installed easily and immediately found all my USB devices - an HP All-in-one printer, a 2 g Flash drive and a 250g hard drive.There were 2 problems in my particular setup, and only one is really the hub's fault:1) The firewall (ZoneAlarm) must be configured to allow the hub to access "the trusted zone". My solution here was to remove the Kodak software from loading during boot - not easy, since that option is not available during the Kodak software install (I used RegCure to disable the Kodak software during boot).
This issue could be either PM8 or the Hub, and only causes a small loss of sleep. I have been unable to find a way to consistently get the firewall completely loaded first, or at least early, in the boot process.
The hard drive is partitioned into 5 40 g partitions.
While I can not directly fault the Belkin F5L009 5 port Network USB hub, I can not fully endorse it. My work laptop has VPN s/w installed and I can not get around it, short of uninstalling it, which is not feasible. I have never done this type of install before, but have been in electronics for over 20 years and have some IT experience, I know enough to get in serious trouble. Had I known this I would have saved my money and waited for a time to buy a wireless printer.
Our work around was to temporarily turn off her firewall, now, this cause blue screens. My wife's laptop has Norton Firewall installed and it also blocks access to the hub. Belkin uses a program called Connect.exe, another program uses that same name and has already been categorized by Norton and does not allow access. So the two laptops I primarily bought this hub for, can not access the printer. I can not find the other Connect.exe. The product it self works fine and was easy to install.
While this should be an easy fix according to Belkin's instruction, there is another hidden detour. Frustrating to say the least. The problem is the unit is not compatible with VPN s/w and at best troublesome with 3rd party firewalls. The unit works fine with our desktop and my personal laptop.
Practically, performance is probably more bound at the mechanics of reading the optical disk, rather than the back-end communication bus.For my (admittedly narrow) purposes, this is a fantastic device; I don't know of any other alternatives out there. Using this device, I was able to get around that limitation by connecting the drive to the VM via Ethernet using this network USB hub.Furthermore, I don't perceive much of a performance degradation (there must be some, since the Ethernet port on this device is only 100Mib, and USB runs at 480Mib). If you're just looking for a print server, look elsewhere - this is not really the right solution. I bought this device to allow me to connect a USB HD-DVD drive to a virtual machine running on a Citrix XenServer. XenServer doesn't permit a user to connect USB devices directly to any virtual machine.
The hub worked great with no network lag time. I also wanted to use the hub to use USB game controllers that would control a PC in the next room with a component cable out to the TV in the family room. I installed this USB hub to the router and it worked instantly. All wireless PCs can easily use the printer attached to the hub after the Belkin software is installed.
That is all. Please vendors start supporting Linux. The only reason I didn't do 5 stars is because it doesn't support Ubuntu. For my Vista box it is working really good.
|
