I’ve been using linux for more than a decade at this point, but in all that time I’ve rarely had a disk drive. The fact that this command exists and is just, one of the core utils included with your distro along with su and kill and mount and more is just… so beautiful. 10 years amore with this OS and I’m still learning things that the elders in the audience are snickering at me for only learning 5 minutes ago while they were popping their disk trays open with a single command back when disk drives were a non optional component.

  • Sturgist@lemmy.ca
    2·
    11 hours ago

    I just tried and it doesn’t seem to work for me.

    Wait…do I need an optical drive for this to work? I think I might have a plug in drive somewhere…

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    There is a whole world of obsolete stuff nobody will ever do with a linux system anymore. Terminal servers with lots of serial terminals or modems for a BBS. Making a fax server, IVR, digital answering machine for analog land lines. Using removable optical or magnetic media. Recording broadcast tv. SCSI, Firewire. It is interesting to imagine what from today will be obsolete in a few years.

  • plum@lemmy.zipEnglish
    117·
    2 days ago

    This command was very useful for quickly finding a server in a row of hundreds of identical servers. No need to read the labels or look up which rack it’s in. Just log in remotely, just use ‘eject’, and then walk down the row to the server that has its tray out.

  • DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world
    153·
    3 days ago

    Very helpful command it was for those, whose modem had to be rebooted daily back in the day: Have a cron-job open the tray, which in turn was placed strategically so that it would hit the reset button of the modem, then close the tray. And voilà; automatic reboot of the modem. Robotics at its finest!

    • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      In the early 2000s, only my rich friends had cell phones. My roommate and I both had accounts on each other’s machines so we could telnet into them on the same local network.

      We used to do this all the time to each other. It was funny to us 25 years ago. It’s still funny now.

  • Courant d'air 🍃@jlai.lu
    57·
    2 days ago

    Back in networking classes we used to have entire rooms of replicated machines, all with contiguous addresses and same logins. We wrote a script to ssh into every computer of the room and eject and retract all the disk drives at the same time, it was wonderful ✨

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 day ago

      You could’ve made music out of ejecting/retracting those all at different times!

      Would’ve actually been fantastic distributed systems practice, synchronizing all of those to tight tolerances of music across a network connection…

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    89·
    3 days ago

    Ah, the good old days of sshing into a family member’s computer and trolling them by constantly opening and closing the drive.

    • Khrux@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

      The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

  • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
    711·
    3 days ago

    You can configure sudo, used to elevate the privileges of a command, to insult users when they type in an incorrect password.

    To do so, edit the sudoers file with a tool called visudo, which edits and validates modifications to the sudo configuration file.

    sudo visudo

    Near the top, add a line that reads:

    Defaults insults

    Save and close the file.