[Samba] Sharing USB devices?

Dr. Thomas Orgis thomas.orgis at uni-hamburg.de
Thu Feb 10 19:11:02 UTC 2022


Am Thu, 10 Feb 2022 13:43:50 -0500
schrieb Hal Vaughan via samba <samba at lists.samba.org>: 

> So a node device points at something specific on the system. If I
> shared one on System A and used it on System B, then System B would
> interpret it as pointing to something on System B - it wouldn’t
> relate it at all to anything on System A.
> 
> Is that correct.

Yes. Although I have to say hat I might be wrong in how Samba handles
it. It guess it actually filters out device files. The main point
is that it won't work as you intended. A NFS appliance I got turns all
device files into MAJOR:MINOR 0:0, for example, preventing actually
useful or possibly dangerous device files (because the wrong user
suddenly has access to /dev/sda).

Linux device files are just a local address label. For a network
filesystem, they're mostly a security issue.

> > AFAIR the Plan 9 project …
> Thank you. I’ll look into that.

Only to satisfy your curiousity. It's a research project that somewhat
lost its spot as the successor to UNIX during the rise of Linux;-)

> > So I second the recommendations to set up a system that offers
> > remote desktop and file sharing on the dirty side and have the
> > client with display and human input on the other side.  
> 
> I’m considering that. I still have a fair amount to research on RMP
> for that. (For instance, how to stream the screen contents when
> there’s no monitor on the server.)

This is a known and solved problem. Lots of desktops are run on servers
that don't even have a video card. VNC is a known old solution. There
are others with varying performance, even just plain remote X11.

But this is out of scope for the Samba list.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

-- 
Dr. Thomas Orgis
HPC @ Universität Hamburg



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