Fedora/Linux as a USB Drive

[Srikanth Konjarla]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> max wrote:
>> Adalbert Prokop wrote:
>>> Srikanth Konjarla wrote on Sunday 13 January 2008:
>>>
>>>  
>>>> I have the network setup currently to share the files between several
>>>> Linux machines and one WindowZe machine. But, i am looking to get two
>>>> linux machines connected together with a USB cable that is independent
>>>> of the network.
>>>>     
>>>
>>> There are "laplink" cables for USB. They have two type A connectors 
>>> and a piece of hardware between them, which acts as a USB network 
>>> card to both ends. So you plug it in and get a new network interface 
>>> (e.g. usb0).
>>>
>>> The rest is identical a normal network card - set IPs or let 
>>> avahi-autoipd do the job and share your files over network.
>>>
>>> I seriously doubt there is a hardware and a driver which would do 
>>> what you want. It would have to emulate a hard drive hardware and a 
>>> file system whithin for your directory structure, not to mention the 
>>> hardware part. I've never heard of something like this.
>>>
>>>   
>> It sounds like what he wants is to connect two computers together with 
>> a cable and have them treat one another like flash drives.
> 
> If the only purpose of the other computer is to give access to the 
> drive, you can get inexpensive external drive cases with USB adapters 
> that would make more sense.  If the other computer is doing something 
> else, then you can use nfs between the linux systems on the same or a 
> different network. Back-to-back USB<->network adapters would work but 
> have no advantage over normal nics and probably take more CPU to drive.
> 

I have three such external hard drives that i use between Linux boxes. I 
guess the idea of using just a USB cable to mount other linux machine 
came from the new audio/video device Archos 605 which i got very 
recently. Unlike iPod this device has lot more intelligence built in the 
device  which is capable of auto mounting the external USB devices at 
the same time the device can be mounted to a machine (Linux/Mac/Win) via 
USB. So, i was wondering if it is possible to mount a Linux machine from 
another Linux machine via USB. BTW, the Archos runs Linux on it.

Srikanth