USB Host-To-Host installation?
Hello boot-meisters:
This morning I had the following brilliant idea;
Would it be possible to connect two computers, perhaps a (desktop ||
server) system, and a (laptop || portable) with a USB cable, and have
one of the systems act as a USB storage device, and the other boots off
of it, just like it was any other USB storage device, like a keychain or
hard drive?
I googled for a while and found this page:
http://www.linux-usb.org/usbnet/
It tells me that you can't connect two machines with a regular USB
cable, but that special host-to-host cables exist. There was no mention
of this host-to-host booting thing in their FAQ though, at least as far
as I could see.
For the following reasons, I think this might be interesting / useful:
A general purpose device (such as a laptop computer) should be able to
emulate a special purpose device (a USB HDD enclosure).
You could help your friends install linux on their computers just by
plugging the cable in to your computer (potentially simpler than setting
up dhcp / tftp / pxelinux).
If the machine exporting the USB storage was active, you could fiddle
around with the install media as the install was happening.
Has anyone given any thought to this before? Insights?
thanks,
Erik
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