Executive Summary:
Problem: Your Drives don't work under linux on the eSATA ports.
Solution: You probably need to set all the jumpers on the card one step to the left, as they ship only configured to make the internal ports work. However, there may be other things you need to do to make stuff function as well. Read below for longer discussion.

First, for eSATA you will need to fix the jumpers on the card by moving them all (yes all of them) over one space to the left so that they bridge the 3 & 2 pins. This is actually printed on the card circuit board near the PATA port, but it says pins 3&4 for some reason (but there is no pin 4).

OK, done. Power up your machine, everything should start working. The drive will be there, (though not mounted or formatted obviously if it's a new drive). If things aren't working or you need more help, the below commands can help troubleshoot.

Commands to figure out what is going on:

check to see if your drive is/is not detected:
sudo fdisk -l
look for a disk the right size that has partitions that match what you are expecting to see. A totally new disk may not have any partition table. If you see the disk in any form, then stop here, you don't have to do the below, you're ready to go. For fun if you have smartmontools installed, you can check the drive SMART status with smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sdx (where x is the drive fdisk saw)

However...
If fdisk can't see the disk...

You may have a kernel that is rather old no (ahci driver) or one doesn't load it for you. (check this so you don't feel silly):
sudo modprobe -l | grep ahci

if this isn't present, go read up on enabling kernel modules for your distro.

You can also check to see if the sata ports seem are up or down to linux:
cat /var/log/messages | grep SATA

this is what a port looks like down:
ata8: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

this is what a port looks like up:
ata8: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)

Note that a sata port on the bytecc will appear as down if the jumpers are not properly set. You will also see a ton of other ports if you have other SATA ports on your machine, so look for listing that appear with the card seated, but don't with it gone.

Lastly, could it be that the PCI Express connector is bad on the card or your board?

look at
lspci -vv
and look for the JMicron SATA controller. If you don't see it, you may have a hardware issue or may not have the kernel driver loaded.

Sorry this was rambling, but hopefully it helped.

So, will folks who aren't on facebook, aren't on twitter, aren't on second life soon lose their communities offline as well as the offline contextual information flows dry up?

Where now we talk in the hallways, around the watercooler, at the pub, over lunch, will we only update our status in net-land and expect everyone to know that our cat died this morning?

What will the world be like for those outside of these networks?

Will the unnetwork world gradually experience a drop in high quality status chatter like the post office is seeing themselves lose volume as personal communications switch over to email? The post office is making it up by charging magazines a fortune, driving many out of business, further shrinking the bandwidth of culture and context that flows to offliners.

Will these analog refugees stumble around in a world where all the information flows that used to take place person to person now take place in these proprietary networks?

Will it be like not knowing the language of the country you are in? (You can see the obvious things, and catch your bus on time but you lose the subtext and plot.)

Will we have translation services to port culture back to the non-cyber backwaters? See Time and newsweek and half the infotainment shows on tv for what this might look like.

I think it may be too late for those who are not online to keep offline culture from becoming constantly more arid (barring major electrical shortages in the next decade) so we must so it may be left to those of us who are online to make sure that the culture of the new frontier stays free and can always be ported back to the non-cyber world. One of the biggest things we must do for ourselves and on behalf of those not online is fight to keep online content free, public, and unowned rather than allowing our cultural rivers to flow through enemy territory.

If you are installing knowledgetree document management software and get a 500 server misconfiguration error you likely don't have mod_expires loaded into apache.

to fix (on debian)
a2enmod expires

You can confirm that this is your problem by checking your server's error log for where it complains about ExpiresActive directive in your .htaccess file. If you find that, the above command will fix it.

update table_name set table_field = replace(table_field,'replace_that','with_this');

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-admin mysql-query-browser apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-mysql php5-gd

For servers, you only need
apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql php5 mysql-server mysql-common php5-gd php5-cli (for drush)

other things that you might want:
openssh-server (for remote servers)
cvs (for systems that will be retrieving packages from drupal.org)
subversion [or] git-core (better version control for everything else)

Then for clean urls, make sure AllowOverride All is set in directory definitions. Then enable mod rewrite:
a2enmod rewrite

Woke up here in Szeged thanks to hotel's wake up call (I forgot an alarm clock -d'oh!). No roomate as of yet, but he should be here tonight.

It's a beautiful morning outside. I'm getting ready for the first day of Drupalcon. Today there are crazy sessions like Dries' keynote and tons of the most interesting stuff that frankly should have been spread out over the other days of the conference. We'll see if I keep up intellectually, technically and socially with what's going on.

Last night went well, I arrived in Seged, got in touch with you all, avoided the hotel room of death (more on that later) and hung out with a bunch of folks in the cafes right down the street. Met Daniel from drupalcenter.de who is a really nice guy, and lots of other nice people. I'll be trying to do some more networking today between all the learning.

No photo for now, but I'm taking them...

Sitting in Marvelosa cafe in Budapest (Buda actually, not Pest) after taking exorbitant taxi ride into town... Cute little floral place.. wifi of the same name.

Having carrot soup and bread with various dips, kinda funny, but good.