Finders, Keepers

Tutorial – USB/IP

Article from Issue 208/2018
Author(s):

The Linux kernel has many interesting but unknown services. USB/IP, in particular, is one that you'll probably wonder why you have never encountered. USB/IP lets you use USB devices connected to other machines on your network as if they were plugged directly into your computer.

This happened to me recently: I have an oldish Brother multifunction printer/scanner/fax machine. It is an okay thing to have and quite useful, but it is as dumb as brick and has no network capabilities at all. This means you must have a computer plugged into it directly if you need to use it. If you want to share it over a network, which of course you do, you have to make the computer a server and have it manage the network side of things.

Brother supplies some drivers for Linux, but they are closed source. This means that, if something doesn't work, you face a familiar conundrum: Firstly, Brother will not assign an engineer to sort out a problem for a system used by a minority of desktop users and a machine that is at least seven years old. Secondly, you can't solve things yourself because the drivers are closed source.

Unfortunately for me, something doesn't work.

[...]

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