USB Device Sharing.

[5-90]

I've tried doing the "Ethernet USB Hub," but it wants to be difficult.

What I'd like to do is share a printer and an external HDA or two over USB - preferably automatically. I'm thinking a "share hub" with two or four ports in and about four ports out should do neatly. I'd like to keep it fairly low-buck (under $50 would just stroke!) and no user intervention (I've seen that sort of thing somewhere, but my Google-Fu is off.)

It's to share the peripherals between my wife's computer and (hopefully) my two, and something we don't have to think about to do (apart from possibly a driver or front-end install on each machine.)

Environment: Win7Pro64, Win7Home64, WinXP Media Centre. Pref USB2 - not all computers have USB3 ports (I think I have the only one at the moment.)

 

[kastein]

No such thing, AFAIK. Why? Because it isn't technically possible unless you like corrupted filesystems from two OSes trying to write to it at the same time, nevermind the difficulty of more than one USB master.

Use a printserver and a NAS or fileserver setup... they exist for a reason.

 

[5-90]

No such thing, AFAIK. Why? Because it isn't technically possible unless you like corrupted filesystems from two OSes trying to write to it at the same time, nevermind the difficulty of more than one USB master.

Use a printserver and a NAS or fileserver setup... they exist for a reason.

Hm, I thought I'd seen something like that. I know that multiple machines writing to the HDA would be a problem - I'd keep "writing privileges" to one machine, I just wanted to give her read access while I was about it. Since all of the machines are NTFS-native, I didn't expect a lot of issues with that.

 

[kastein]

They can all be NTFS native all they want, that doesn't solve the concurrency/semaphore/mutex issues involved in handling reads/writes from more than one host. Hell, filesystem structures would probably be corrupted even with only one machine having write permissions simply because of the access-time fields being updated by the others when reading.

Basically, it'd be like trying to have two people read a "choose your own adventure" book when they don't read at the same speed or make the same choices, even without anyone writing at the same time, everyone is going to get pissed off.

 

[ChiXJeff]

To put it another way, NTFS, FAT, ext[234], XFS, JFS, etc., are all single node filesystems, i.e. they are only safe to mount on a single computer at a time. Period. I wouldn't even trust a "read-only", as these are all single node only, I'd expect it to cache a lot, and as a result miss filesystem updates and claim corruption as a result.

There are multi-host aware filesystems out there. I really doubt that you want to deal with any of them.

If you do need to make a drive available to multiple hosts, you do need to use a networked filesystem like NFS, CIFS/SMB/Samba, or the like. See Ken's suggestion about a NAS or print server.

 

[5-90]

They can all be NTFS native all they want, that doesn't solve the concurrency/semaphore/mutex issues involved in handling reads/writes from more than one host. Hell, filesystem structures would probably be corrupted even with only one machine having write permissions simply because of the access-time fields being updated by the others when reading.

Basically, it'd be like trying to have two people read a "choose your own adventure" book when they don't read at the same speed or make the same choices, even without anyone writing at the same time, everyone is going to get pissed off.

Bugger. Point taken (from both of you.)

However, is there a low-buck solution that will work for directly sharing one or more printers?

 

[David_Bricker]

Printer sharing should be pretty straight forward. My last two cheap (under $200) printers have had both Ethernet cable and wireless attachment, besides the usual USB connection. Tie it to your network, and poof.

Making an existing non-notwork connected printer could be a bit more work. In that case, back to the NAS device, and connect the printer through it.

David Bricker / SYR

 

[ChiXJeff]

With a little work, you don't need anything else beyond what you've already got. Unless you're running something ancient like Win95 or NT, you should be able to share a drive or a directory structure on your home network. Likewise, with printers. My g/f has (or had, it's being decommissioned,) a USB attached HP multi-function printer/scanner. Even my Linux boxes could use it after sharing it on the network.

 

[5-90]

With a little work, you don't need anything else beyond what you've already got. Unless you're running something ancient like Win95 or NT, you should be able to share a drive or a directory structure on your home network. Likewise, with printers. My g/f has (or had, it's being decommissioned,) a USB attached HP multi-function printer/scanner. Even my Linux boxes could use it after sharing it on the network.

Maybe I should go through & reset things, then. I've tried getting everything to co-operate on the network, but things keep wanting to not play nice with Win7.

The other reason I want to share over USB is because the LJ2200dtn's NIC smoked on me (the printer itself is approaching EOL, but still prints. No NIC & need to duplex manually, but quality is still good,) and I want to do so without being dependent on a given machine being attached and up.