Ethernet over USB
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Ethernet over USB has two meanings: Ethernet devices via USB and USB as an Ethernet network.
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[edit] Ethernet devices via USB
The ability to connect Ethernet devices via USB ports is known as Ethernet over USB. There are many low cost commercial adapters available to do this. The links below describe the technical details on how the technology works.
[edit] Treat USB as an Ethernet network
The Linux kernel for the iPAQ uses this communications strategy exclusively, since the iPAQ hardware has neither an accessible serial port nor a dedicated network interface.
The usb-eth module in Linux emulates an imaginary Ethernet device that uses USB as the physical media. Once created, this network interface can be assigned an IP address and otherwise treated as though it were ordinary Ethernet hardware. The usb-eth module allows the USB device to "see" the Internet (if the Internet is there), ping other IP addresses, and even "talk" DHCP, HTTP, NFS, telnet, and e-mail. In short, any applications that work over real Ethernet interfaces will work over a usb-eth interface without modification, because they can't tell that they aren't using real Ethernet hardware. [1]
On Linux hosts, the corresponding Ethernet-over-USB kernel module is called usbnet. A recently-announced usbnet-style driver for Win32 hosts is called the Bahia Network Driver. [2]
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