Friday, July 14, 2006

USB disconnect when downloading images from Canon PowerShot S50

I have been attempting to download photos from my Canon PowerShot S50. When I connect the camera it is correctly detected. However, when I attempt to download (a large number of) photos it fails after some time, and I see the following in the kernel ring buffer:

$ dmesg | tail
[17203180.356000] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 2
[17203648.852000] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[17203953.496000] usb 2-1: usbfs: USBDEVFS_CONTROL failed cmd gthumb rqt 64 rq 4 len 118 ret -71
[17203953.544000] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 3

vpnc drops connection after apparent inactivity

I have been successfully using vpnc to provide a VPN connectivity on Ubuntu Dapper Drake. However, it seemed to drop the connection more frequently than I was used to when using the Cisco client vpn-client.

This tended to coincide with periods of inactivity so I tried running a periodic ping

ping -i ip-host

and the problem appears to have been solved.