[X2Go-User] USB forwarding documentation

[Ulrich Sibiller]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 12:39 AM, Stefan Baur <X2Go-ML-1 at baur-itcs.de> wrote:
> Am 07.11.2017 um 23:56 schrieb Seth Galitzer:
>> On 11/07/2017 03:49 PM, Stefan Baur wrote:
>>> Am 07.11.2017 um 21:41 schrieb Seth Galitzer:
>>>> I'm calling xfreerdp from TCE to connect directly to the RDP server.
>>>> I've been trying to find the right cli options for xfreerdp to use for
>>>> this, but documentation is pretty light on this and I have yet to find
>>>> something that works.
>>>>
>>>> If I run dmesg on the thin client device from within the TCE desktop, I
>>>> can see that my flash drive is recognized, but it's not getting mounted.
>>>> That sounds like a udev issue within debian, but I was hoping somebody
>>>> on the list had already solved this problem.
>>>
>>> So your actually have two problems:
>>> 1) getting the automounter to mount your flash drive.
>>
>> I've found two ways to do this so far:
>> A) Install usbmount package (https://usbmount.alioth.debian.org/). I've
>> tested this and it works, but needs some tweaking to produce a
>> reliable/duplicatable mount point. This claims to work for vfat, ext*
>> and hfs.
>>
>> B) Configure udev to use pmount when a USB storage device is detected
>> (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/124060). I haven't tested this yet,
>> but if the above option works, I'm guessing this is the manual
>> implementation of it, so it should work.
>
> Neither of these options is going to make it into an official TCE build,
> I'm afraid.  The thing is, we *have* an automounter, it does more than
> just mounting the drive, and it does things in certain ways X2GoClient
> expects them to be.  So teaching ours to handle additional filesystem
> types is going to be easier than ripping it out, replacing it with
> usbmount/pmount, and then adding all those bells and whistles again that
> we need for supporting mounts in an X2Go session.
> And if you install any of those in parallel to our automounter, there's
> no guarantee where your mounts will end up.

Having a generic mechanism to forward usb devices is something
frequently asked for. The approach with usbmount and udev/pmount is
not a generic one, it's only for storage, if I get that right. So I
agree with you objections.

I mentioned some possible solutions for the generic approach some time
ago, namely http://www.incentivespro.com/usb-server.html and
http://usbip.sourceforge.net/. So, Seth, maybe you could try those and
report the results. Maybe integration proves not to be so difficult.

Uli