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.

  • DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world
    151·
    7 days ago

    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!

    • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      6 days 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.

  • plum@lemmy.zipEnglish
    119·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Courant d'air 🍃@jlai.lu
    58·
    7 days ago

    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 ✨

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      6 days 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…

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    12·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
    2·
    4 days 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.

  • Squiddlioni@kbin.melroy.org
    27·
    7 days 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.

    • flatbield@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      Eject is not just for CDs. You still have to eject any hot mount physical media. Sadly the eject command only works in some cases. I do not think it works for hot mount SATA dives for example.

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
    19·
    7 days ago

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

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      13·
      7 days ago

      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.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
          2·
          6 days ago

          I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

          Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

          I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        5 days 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

      • markstos@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 days ago

        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.

        • Quazatron@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          Yep, Zip drives only had 100MB, the disks were clunky and were prone to get the Click of Death (not that LS-120 disks were any better in that sense, of course).

  • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
    17·
    7 days 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.