Is USB over ethernet possible

[Chris G]

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 07:47:08PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> 2008/5/9 Chris G <cl at isbd.net>:
> > Going on from that recent question about ethernet over USB is the
> > opposite possible?
> >
> > I.e. I have two Linux boxes networked and one has a USB device that I
> > would like to be able to see as a USB device from the other Liux box.
> > Can that be done?
> >
> 
> At home I have two Ubuntu machines on a router, each with their own
> LAN IP address (DHCP). One has SSH enabled. I can plug a USB device
> into that machine, which is automagically mounted in /media/usbstick.
> I can then SSH into that machine and browse the USB stick.
> 
> Now, as for mounting a USB webcam, I would imagine that it can be done
> by mounting the remote /dev/video locally but I've never tried. What
> other USB devices did you have in mind?
> 
I currently have a USB disk drive on a machine in my garage which I
use for backups.  Currently I access this as follows:-

    It's mounted locally on the garage system.

    It's NFS exported from the garage system.

    It's NFS mounted on my desktop system.

While this works it's not 100% satisfactory because firstly it's a
*bit* difficult to guarantee that the mount of the USB drive on the
garage system happens automatically when it powers up.  Secondly if
the garage system powers down and then up again I get the dreaded
"Stale NFS File Handle" on my desktop system and it's a real pig to
clear that and get the mounts working again.

If I could 'see' the drive on my desktop system as a USB drive then I
could mount it there on an 'as needed' basis (i.e. when the backup
cron job does a backup) and I would need NFS.


I've just had a "lateral thinking" thought, it might be that sshfs
would be more robust than NFS for this sort of use.

-- 
Chris Green