Mr. Stern-
Thanks for continuing to entertain my wild conjectures :)The reason I'd like it to look like a hardware / removable storage device is so that it can be recognized as such at boot time, before the os loads. For background, I am more frequently on the debian-boot list than on this list :)
The debian installer currently supports booting from USB
keychains, Zip Drives, CD-ROM, hard drive, etc. To my mind (apoligies again if i use the wrong terminology), the next logical step would be to allow one machine to boot off of 'USB storage' that one machine is exporting to another machine.
To put it another way, if you have linux running on one machine, for example a laptop, and want to install it on another machine, for example a server, one way to do it is to download an installer, copy it onto a 256mb USB keychain, then plug the keychain into the clean server, and boot it off of the keychain.
If such a device as I described in our previous messages existed (a PC masquerading as a "USB storage device"), you could instead plug a cable between the laptop and the server, and boot the server from the laptop. This might allow you to, among other things, add files to the emulated 'storage device' that the server sees, on the fly, in case you forgot a driver or something. Alternately, it would allow you to have an entire OS mirror on the emulated 'storage device' so there would be no media changes necessary during the install, etc.
It might also be interesting from the point of view that more devices might know how to speak, out of the box the standard 'usb storage device' protocol, while few know how to speak the whole 'usb hardware networking + TCP/IP + NFS' protocol stack.
Such an emulation device might have more potential applications for both users and developers, the linux instller one is just the one that I imangine.
Erik
--- mr. stern said:
> Why not just use a symmetrical setup, where each host thinks it's
> connected via its USB port to a network where it can see the other host?
> Then normal networking protocols (like NFS) will allow each to appear as a
> storage device to the other and will permit other tasks as well (like
> remote login).
--- in response to erik saying:
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...
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