At last it seems like India is following China's footsteps in restricting her citizens' access to the Internet. Wikileaks.org - a well known site that "publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors" (description from wikipedia entry ) has been apparently blocked by the Sarkari ISP- BSNL. Tonight, while trying to lookup a "confidential" (alas! no longer confidential) working paper (wikileaks link) about India's proposed "Multipurpose National Identity Card" (link), I was unable to reach Wikileaks.org from my BSNL Broadband connection directly, although the site could be opened through most public proxy servers. Just to verify that it is indeed the Sarkari BSNL who is trying to act smart, I connected through Airtel Mobile Office EDGE connection and I could easily view the page. What a shame for a "Democratic Republic". It seems India is really trying to join the "elite" league of countries like China and Iran. (Others kindly check if your ISP allows access to Wikileaks.org , if not try this mirror at a different IP address - wikileaks.se .)
I have a 400GB Seagate IDE HDD connected to Mars, our hostel's file-server using an USB enclosure. The USB enclosure is a cheap "Made in China" product. Consequently it has some special "features". One such notable "feature" is that the disk is kept spinning by the controller even if there has been no disk I/O for a long time. I have three other USB disks connected to the same machine, a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive, a 500GB Maxtor Basics External Drive and a 2.5" 60GB Fujitsu SATA Disk inside a Transcend USB enclosure. All of these spin down themselves if there has been no I/O for sometime. Keeping the hard disk spinning unnecessarily for ever, not only wastes power but also overheats the drive, thereby reducing its life. I tried noflushd, which is supposed to force idle hard disks to spin down, but found it to be of no help. USB enclosure generally work by performing an SCSI emulation over USB. sdparm is an utility which can be use...
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