Research And Application Of Network Block Device In Linux Environment

Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the standard data interface of a variety of electronic devices, possesses an extremely broad range of applications. The most conventional method of data resource sharing is duplicating and transferring data through USB storage device. The biggest advantage of this method is its wide range of applications. But its shortcomings are that data replication will take a longtime, needing for large-capacity storage devices as data mediums.When transferring data through network, we do not need storage media to copy and transfer data. But the main drawback is that equipments which support network transmission are relatively few, this induced its narrow range of applications. Moreover, if cable network was used, the moving range and flexibility will be severely restricted.In order to integrate the advantages of the two methods above, while avoiding their shortcomings, this paper presents a new resource-sharing approach. That is to build a wireless network according to IEEE 802.11g standard, use Network Block Device protocol to obtain the resources of remote server, and then submit the data to user via USB interface. Such a scheme not only retained the USB removable storage devices'advantages of the wide range of application and the feature of plug and play, but also absorbed the features of network transmission, such as real-time access and be independent of storage media.This design takes full advantage of the widespread USB interface resources, achieves a convenient sharing of resources. The outcomes of actual tests also show that, such data sharing mechanism brings the network transmission capacity into full play, has a high value of practical uses.