On 16 Oct 2009, at 12:58, Alex Schuster wrote:
daid kahl wrote:
Not really specific to gentoo, except that I want to do this with a
Gentoo PC: Is it possible to attach my Gentoo PC 'G' to another PC
'W'
(running Windows) via USB, so that G appears to be a removable
media to
W? I think you need special USB cables with some electronics in the
middlle for that, and I saw such a solution for Windows. Does
anybody
know if this is possible with Linux?
Did you consider something like an ethernet cable and using samba? I
haven't used my Linux drive specifically in another Windows machine,
but samba works fine for using our network scanner (and I can browse
the relevant filesystems setup in Samba).
The problem with this is that the PC is a closed system used for
medical
ultrasound acquisitions, and I do not have access to it. So I cannot
configure any shares, and have to use what is already configured. The
software allows export of data to an USB stick, but I would like to
avoid
having to move the stick around to the Linux PC afterwards.
The hack that springs to mind is to see if you can pick up an Openmoko
Freerunner with a broken screen. I'd guess you might be able to pick
one up for as little as $50 or so. It needs no SIM - you just connect
it to your office wifi instead, configure it to act as a mass storage
device and share the appropriate directory by Samba or NFS or whatever.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Using_the_Neo_as_an_USB_Mass_storage_device
Configuring the device to boot up and automagically load the mass
storage device kernel module - instead of the USB networking one,
which is default - could be a bit tricky with a broken screen. But I
doubt if you want to spend $200 on this, and I think that's about the
going rate on a brand new Freerunner. I guess if you could buy one
that the seller has proven working via ssh to USB - which is really
standard on this device, it defaults to 192.168.0.202 - then you could
get it to connect to your wifi and bind sshd to that interface, also.
Once you know that's good and reliable, remove the USB interface from
the sshd configuration, stop it from loading the USB ethernet module
at boot and have it load the mass storage device module instead.
I do feel this is kinda a clumsy suggestion, to use a relatively
expensive mobile phone - and such little of its functionality - for
such an ostensibly-simple task. There must be other Linux-based
devices which will pretend to be mass storage devices, and I wouldn't
be at all surprised if some of them were quite cheap and readily
available. But I have no idea what they might be.
Stroller.
