Linux

While I know that it's possible to use something like SANE to share a USB scanner over a network, or use NBD or iSCSI to share a USB flash or external HD over the network, I've been wondering about a raw USB <--> TCP/IP transport. Back in the late 90s, I swear I remember hearing about a project for the Linux kernel to be able to export USB devices over a network using SCSI packets over TCP. Did this evolve into the iSCSI projects, or is there still something out there that would allow me to take something like a support USB graphics tablet and export the USB device to another host?

My application for this is the thin client model I'm using at home. I use NX for the thin client and FreeNX for the server side. While I can connect my graphics tablet and use it on the thin client with it's local X server, I am not able to have an application like Gimp on the application server recognize my tablet. I think this would only be possible if I could take the raw USB device and export it to the application server which would then map it to the server's /dev/input hierarchy.

However, the uses go farther than that. In general, I'm really just looking for a way to plug a USB device into my thin client (a laptop) and export it to the application server. This would help me out with a number of applications. Anything like that out there?

There is a usbip driver in staging area of 2.6.29. I think it was there in 2.6.28

check out USB/IP Project

This isn't the project, but this looks even better than what I saw in 1998! Thanks for the link, I'll definitely be trying this out. I'll have to see if I can get Xen to run one of these newer kernels in paravirtualized mode.