Thanks for your response!
Apoligies if I have used the wrong terminology. The 'host-to-host' cable I am referring to I see described other places as a USB-Net cable, a smartlink cable, a file transfer cable, etc. There seems to be one for sale here:
http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GUN161
What made me refer to this as a host-to-host usb cable was that it came up as such when I searched for that string on google.
The essence of what I am looking for, is exactly what you described; one machine to act as a storage device for another.
After doing some more reading I understand what you mean regarding a usb 'host' and 'device'. I think I was envisioning that a usb 'host' could emulate a 'device', i.e. one PC could emulate an external hard drive, but it seems like there are hardware issues. Is there a general purpose / programmable USB controller that can be configured to be either a host or a device?
The device i referred to above, what I called a 'host-to-host cable', solves the problem of connecting two hosts in the following way: it puts a 'device' in the middle of the cable, in between the two hosts, so each host is individually talking to a device, but through the device they are talking to each other.
Something that strikes me as being more useful / interesting would be a similar 'host to host' cable, with a device/gadget in the middle, but asymmetrical in the following way: Plug the green end of the cable into a host, and that host sees it as a storage device. To the host that the other end is plugged into (blue), it appears to be a USB networking device. You could run different sorts of software (for example NFS) that would supply the blue end with filesystems, and the machine on the green end would see it as an external / usb hard drive.
This is obviously non-trivial logic required in the middle, but if there is a 'programmable controller' such as i described above it doesn't seem like it would be impossible...
thanks again for the insights, Erik
Alan Stern wrote:
On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Erik Dykema wrote:
Hi USB Guys-
I have a question that I haven't seen an answer to in the FAQ's, so would like to ask it here, if anyone has an answer or could point me towards more information I would really would appreciate it! Greg KH pointed me at this list.
I would like to know if it would be possible on linux, using a
host-to-host cable, for one machine to act as a storage device for
another machine. In other words, to have one machine pretend to be a
USB hard drive or CD-ROM drive by 'exporting' a directory / partition /
group of files.
I originally posed this question to the debian-boot list, but so far no one seems to have any thoughts on the matter.
There is no such thing as a USB host-to-host cable.
It is possible for one machine to act as a storage device for another, but that machine must act as a USB device, not a host. It requires special hardware -- a USB device interface; the normal USB host interface won't work. Perhaps closer to what you are thinking of is USB On-The-Go (OTG), which provides a way for two devices to talk to one another (if my understanding is correct).
There's more information available at <http://www.linux-usb.org>. See especially the "gadget" link at the bottom of the page.
Alan Stern
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