max wrote on Sunday 13 January 2008: > I don't see why it should be difficult but I have to admit I have not > tried such a thing. What's the difference between mounting an IPOD via > usb and another computer? There are several differences. I admit I never used an iPod, but let's assume it acts like an ordinary flash MP3 player. The first first difference: iPod is an USB slave device, the PC's USB controller is a master. Master works well with a slave, two masters don't work together. That is simply a matter of USB design. So whenever two masters have to be connected, you need extra hardware between them. As Les just pointed out (his answer came in faster than I could reply... ;-)) iPod "knows" how to act as mass storage device. I guess it exposes its internal storage over USB. As soon as it is disconnected the iPod can access its storage itself. > The > computers have the advantage of knowing each others language, so to > speak, No they don't. :) They know how to talk to mass storage devices, but they do know how to behave as a mass storage device. > I could see the benefit in communicating this way between > machines and sharing a single network interface or simply plugging to > machines together to distribute a compiling job. Of course it would be beneficial. But you run into *many* problems. You would have to emulate a mass storage device with sectors (how big should it be?) and all those thing. On this faked device there would have to be a file system (which one?... FAT? ext2? ext3? NTFS? HFS+?) and all write operations would have to be kept synchronized to avoid file system corruption, which is almost impossible. Why impossible? Because mounting system would see a mass storage device and use all sorts of caching and optimized writing strategies. Mass storage devices simple were not designed for beeing used by multiple hosts. Of course all those problems could be solved. One could use a distributed file system and write all needed drivers. It would cost time and the benefits would not be worth all the trouble. -- bye, Adalbert Androphobia: Fear of men.
