this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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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.

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[–] DeuxChevaux 158 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago

That is fantastic.

[–] art 9 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 117 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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.

[–] passiveaggressivesonar 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I was wondering why they still sold servers with disk drives

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

For deploying your sick playlist to production, obviously!

[–] passiveaggressivesonar 6 points 2 weeks ago

No not mine, thermal performance always goes haywire 😔

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I haven't worked in a data center in years, so I don't know the current norm for server hardware.

[–] lemming741 24 points 2 weeks ago

VPS providers hate this one trick

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

i envy you. lol

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] markstos 78 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] hakunawazo 4 points 2 weeks ago

The finger guillotine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Bologna storage.

[–] horse_battery_staple 71 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I found out about this recently and I love it. I don't know why I like to be insulted, it makes me laugh.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm sure you do, you little scum! /s

[–] horse_battery_staple 3 points 2 weeks ago

Don't ever match wits with a rutabaga

[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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 ✨

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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...

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Disk... drive?

what-year-is-it.jpeg

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The year to backup (rip) your DVDs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I long ago moved to a pair of 4TB hdds and recently upgraded to a pair of 16TBs

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago

tilts head

plugs in USB optical drive

eject

pop

hehe

push tray back in

eject

pop

hehehe

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago

Almost 20 years ago I convinced my high school library to let me install Debian on one of the computer groups. I found the "eject" command, and wrote a script that just invoked it with an argument to close the tray. I named that script "inject". Being high schoolers, my friends and I made scripts to "eject" and "inject", along with various beeps, and named the scripts suggestive and tawdry things. We all had a good giggle setting the systems off on their little routines and walking away.

[–] Feathercrown 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

[–] Quazatron 13 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I've never encountered another LS-120 user before. When it came out I assumed it would be the future, because 120 megabyte freaking laser assisted floppy, am I right? Turns out I was very much mistaken, and CD-R took over.

I also made the same mistake regarding CF vs SD cards.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

For the next storage revolution go with the opposite of your prediction maybe

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[–] markstos 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

120 MB? That’s more than a ZipDisk!

I knew I attended a well-funded modern college because all the computers had been upgraded with ZipDrives.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

CF, or their follow-up CFast, are still in industrial PCs - at least in the Beckhoff IPCs my (ok, more like "my customers") Automat is sporting

Used as system storage and easy to swap for the customer in regards of backups, if something breaks

[–] mumblerfish 17 points 2 weeks ago

They should make a usb-port with a spring in it which can be released with eject. Until then I have to be content with just making sound effects when I run eject on other devices.

[–] Reddfugee42 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Those are discs not disks kiddo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I was wondering about OP's soft-eject floppy drive. Seems quite retrofuturistic.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

I need to go put my DVD drive back in my tower to try this!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I used to play with Linux at college back in 2002 and install the distros on the front of magazines. Eject opens the cd drive but did you know it hangs unless you umount the mount point first? Back in those days everything had to be painfully mounted and unmounted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

If you use arch (btw) it still does

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

woa what the frick!! that actually scared me it's like 2001 space odyssey type of stuff

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I still have a disk drive but eject doesn't seem to affect it since for some reason I don't have a /dev/cdrom. I just checked with the physical eject button on the drive and it is at least still physically working—the tray ejects! I don't have any optical media to test if the drive still works to read CDs though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Try eject /dev/sr0, that should be your disk drive if it is attached via SATA or USB. /dev/cdrom is usually just a symlink.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Sorry, my what ? Are you talking about relics of the past ? ;D

[–] netvor 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

lemme guess.. and inject would close it again?

[–] hellfroze 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

eject -t

There's also eject -T which is a toggle.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

don't use it if you're flying a plane, though!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I have a Blu-ray drive, though my case doesn’t have 5.25” bays, so I just have the SATA cables come put the side.

The sole reason I have it is because once a couple years back, I wanted to watch the Star Trek: TNG Spanish dub, which was only available in the US on a Bluray, which I promptly borrowed from my local library.

I have used it a couple times after, though - once to burn a CD-R with TinyCore to boot on a Pentium II laptop, and once to backup a Bluray with a dub only available on that medium.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks 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.....

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