Re: Can debian act as an USB mass storage device?
On Tuesday 12 June 2007, Lethal Possum wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a pretty simple question but so far I have not been able to
> find the answer on the Net. I have a file server running Debian (etch)
> that I currently connect to with samba. It is great but I would also
> like to be able to simply plug my laptop into the server with a USB
> cable and see the server as a mass storage device. I don't see any
> major issue with this solution so I guess it is feasible. Does anyone
> ever tried to setup something like that?
>
> Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
>
> Thomas
Yes, but most server hardware USB ports are the host end, not the device
end. There are some USB chips that can be either, but they are generally
found on embedded boards rather than ordinary PC motherboards. You need
to look for USB Gadget support in the kernel. If you look at the NSLU2
support you will find that it does exactly this.
An alternative is to use Ethernet connectivity, and use iSCSI or ATA over
Ethernet(AoE). That way you do not need any special hardware but
if your Ethernet is slow you will notice it both in terms of access speed
to the disk and the available bandwidth for other network applications.
AoE is available in the current kernels, I am not quite sure about iSCSI,
but there is a project at open-iscsi.org which has all the code.
David
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