Pogoplug E02 Questions

[khord]

Hi, I'm new to archlinux, so forgive me if these questions are elementary. I literally got this Pogoplug yesterday and started working on it last night.

I installed ALarm, Samba, and Shairport following this guide: http://blog.qnology.com/2013/03/tutorial-pogoplug-e02-with-arch-linux.html

I have a couple questions:

1. What is a safe way to shut down the Pogoplug for storage? It's unsafe to just unplug it right?
2. Are there optimal settings for the audio to reduce hiss background noise? I have the Master amixer volume set to 60%, and my libao and asound confs seem to be correct with mmap disabled according to this http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3686&p=20928&hilit=asound#p20928
I was thinking it could just be my usb dac though. I'm using cheap ones, however in other instances they don't have noise.
3. Is there a way to have the hard disk stop spinning sooner when idle? Sometimes I hear it spinning for a short bit, then silence for a long time, but other times it spins for quite a while.

[coachward0742]

Hey khord,

I have no experience with the audio portion so I can not help with question 2, but I can answer the other two.

1. As far as shutting it down, it is not recommended to just unplug it as there is a slight risk of corrupting the filesystem. I usually run the commands "sync" and "systemctl poweroff" to make sure that no issues can arise from unplugging the system. Wait a few minutes after running these commands before unplugging the pogoplug.

3. If you are running the rootfs from the hard drive, you will have a hard time keeping the hdd idle as some processes may want to write something to the disk at times. If this is a separate drive, I suggest installing hdparm with pacman and read the man pages to set it up.

[grayman4hire]

@khord,

I provided the optimal audio settings in the tutorial.

What USB DAC are you using?

gray