Firewire problems

You may recall that I've been having some problems getting my iPod and Sony camcorder to work over the IEEE1394 link to my PC (or any other computer for that matter).

Things haven't really moved forward much. However, I did take the iPod back to the retailer a couple of weeks ago and told them it was faulty. It apparently went off to Apple to be repaired and should be back "soon".

I tried my camcorder in the 1394 port of my SunBlade 2000, and it too failed to recognise that anything was plugged in. Normally, in Solaris 10, the system will detect the connection and then attempt to locate a suitable device driver. If it can't find a driver, it then reports that using syslog. No message at all in syslog, so obviously the system doesn't actually see the camcorder. So, this morning the camcorder went off to the local Sony repair centre in the hope that they can find and fix the fault.

Given that both devices appear to be faulty, I'm leaning towards the possibility that the 1394 port on my PC into which I first plugged the devices was faulty and has somehow damaged them. Either that or it's a very strange coincidence.

More news will follow when the iPod returns from Apple.

Posted on: Feb 11, 2005

Posted by: tdw

Category: General

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Comments:

Hi there - I remember similar stuff happening with my little Sony dsc-s85 digital camera back around the Solaris 9 timeframe : scsa2usb should have seen the device and if it was supported, would have done something with it, otherwise would have written an error message to syslog. Turns out, the device wasn't fully mass-storage compliant, and Solaris couldn't deal with it, but was "nearly compliant" enough for a message not to get written to syslog. (see 4500754 and comments in /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf) They've fixed that specific problem now, but I wonder are you seeing a similar problem with your firewire device, just a thought.

Posted by Tim Foster on February 11, 2005 at 11:30 AM GMT #

Cheers Tim!

It could be a similar fault. However, since my camcorder fails to be detected on both my PC and Linux box too through the FireWire interface, I suspect the camera is the root cause of the problem.
We shall see in due course...

Posted by Trevor Watson on February 11, 2005 at 12:59 PM GMT #

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