[nfbcs] USB drive on two machines at the same time?

[Doug Lee]

I'm not sure where best to ask this question, so besides actual
answers, I welcome pointers on where to send this one.  My excuse for
posting this here in the first place is that I need the device I'm
about to describe for scripting projects. :)

I am looking for a USB drive, or better yet, a USB device that allows
a drive to be connected to it, that then allows the drive to be
plugged into the USB ports of two computers at the same time.  To each
computer, it would be a USB drive pretty much like any other.  I know
this issue is normally solved with a Network Appliance, but that is
not possible in my situation for security reasons.

A specific example:  I want to plug this device into, say, a desktop
computer's USB port and a laptop's USB port at the same time, write
files to the drive from the laptop, and read them off the drive with
the desktop.  I'm even ok if the drive is mounted read/write by the
laptop but as read-only by the desktop.  (This would cover most
security issues I've encountered in my work, since most sites will let
you bring data into a machine but not write it back out of it.)  The
device must use USB connections, not Ethernet (Cat 5) connections.  As
a last resort if the two-USB idea doesn't exist, I could probably work
with something that allowed one USB connection and a simultaneous WiFi
connection, as long as the WiFi connection supports WPA2.

I notice one technical detail that may present a problem:  The OS on
the desktop, in my above example, would somehow need to know not to
cache the drive data aggressively, even if it mounts the drive as a
read-only device, because the laptop could change the data at any
moment.

Does such a device exist anywhere?

-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit
of it. You have to catch up with it yourself." --Benjamin Franklin