Recognizing thumbdrive....

[Allanon]

It's possible that Untangle does not contain drivers, utilities etc. for USB. Regards...

Not totally true.. within the web interface gui there's a backup utility that among it's choices are local file, or USB. From the few response I've gotten the USB option is specifically for thumbdrives, however like I mentioned before since it seems this is an OS issue rather than an Untangle issue specifically as the error I get says tha it cannot locate the USb device. I figured maybe the folks who do the majority of the posting there don't have a ton of pure Linux experience. Which again led me here.. by my reckoning I assumed that maybe if I could get some Linux assistance is trying to determine if my thumbdrive is even being recognized, then maybe I'd have more ammo to go back to Untangle with this is a bug report possibly..

[rusty]

If the distro ships with apt , then see if you can install usbutils. As root , get a command line shell and type:

apt-get update && apt-get install usbutils

If that works, you should be able to type: lsusb and see your device, or not.

Another thing to try is to determine whether usb drivers are running by typing: lsmod|grep usb , the output of which might look like this:

knoppix@Knoppix:~$ lsmod|grep usb
usblp                  18432  0
usb_storage            73408  0
usbhid                 56928  0
ff_memless              9992  1 usbhid
libusual               20624  1 usb_storage
usbcore               135812  9 cdc_acm,usblp,usb_storage,usbhid,libusual,ohci_hcd,uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd

You can of course read the fine manual pages for the commands to see what they do by typing: man <command>, at a prompt. ie. man lsmod or man grep.