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

[Bryan Schulz]

hi,

i suspect you would overload the drive with double the voltage but...
if you have the drive to experiment with destroying,
get a usb/esata external enclosure as newer laptops have the new esata port 
then one computer could connect by regular usb and the other computer could 
connect thru the esata cable.

Bryan Schulz

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Lee" <dgl at dlee.org>
To: "NFB in Computer Science Mailing List" <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2011 10:02 AM
Subject: [nfbcs] USB drive on two machines at the same time?


> 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
>
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