> Hello,
> I do have here old notebook good enough to be just an
> X11 terminal to my Solaris (snv_79a) workstation. The
> user on this terminal would like to use from time to
> time her USB flash drive. My question is: is it
> possible with X11 by using some clever trick? The
> notebook is running Xubuntu this time. It does have
> just 190MB of RAM so probably no way to attempt to
> run Solaris on it. The ideal user interaction would
> be if USB inserted drive would cause opening nautilus
> window in the remote X11 session with the drive
> content.
> Thanks!
> Karel

Unlike Sun Rays or perhaps some other remote desktop protocols,
X11 doesn't do storage devices; X11 doesn't do anything other than
graphics out, screen/mouse/similar pointing device in.  X11 doesn't
even do sound; there was something that was supposed to develop
in that direction, but it never did.

The notebook could of course mount the USB flash drive locally, and NFS
export it; and the Solaris workstation could NFS mount it.  That's two steps,
not one, because there's no protocol to tell the workstation to check if
if the laptop has something available to mount.  Having said that, there is
something, sort of.  If the workstation is running automountd and has /net
mounts enabled, it should be possible to just cd to /net/laptopname/mountpoint
and see the contents of the flash drive.  It's up to you (or someone, but not 
the
OS on either system) to make sure the user-ids and group-ids match up.
The problem with using the /net mount is that the workstation will hold
the mount for some time (10 minutes by default) after the last use of anything
in the mount (even current directory), and will get rather upset if the NFS
server (the laptop) stops making the storage available.  And the only way
I know of to even shorten that interval is dumb, because it takes manual
intervention and isn't a persistent setting.  Otherwise, for such a small scale
use, I'd say it might be no big deal to shorten that interval down to where
it wasn't too annoying - 15 seconds, say.

So, possible?  Sort of.  Not incredibly friendly, certainly not transparently 
like
having a magic remote USB port somehow directly to the Solaris workstation.
-- 
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