[CentOS] share folder as USB mass storage device

Tue Jul 8 15:40:15 UTC 2008
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Bent Terp wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> Maybe I'm just being silly here, but I'm wondering if anybody has ever
> used their computer for sharing files over USB. That is, the computer
> pretends to be a USB mass storage device.
>
> This could be useful for connecting to media players and such that
> support you plugging a USB harddrive or memory stick.
>
> Surely, somebody must have thought of this before :-D
>   

the USB interface only supports one 'master' (a computer) and all other 
devices are 'slaves'.    the master and slave controllers are quite 
different.  you'd need a special dongle to do this. 

and, of course, for the specific application you mention, you'd be 
sharing a raw block device, not 'files'...    most of those devices are 
expecting a FAT or FAT32 file system on the mass storage device, so 
you'd need to have a FAT(32) file system, either on a loopback file or a 
real disk partition, that you would unmount then share via this 
hypothetical SUB virtual block device.