usbip-ssh

This script is using the kernel's USB/IP modules and the ssh's connection forwarding mechanism to import usb devices from another linux machine.

It does not depend on the USB/IP's project userland components and does not require any extra software on either the local or the remote machine besides an openssh client/server and a base perl installation.

The script itself only has to be installed on the local machine -- the only configuration you have to do on the remote machine is setting up ssh auth correctly (by copying your public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, etc) so you can log in as root.

Assuming that you did that, you can try:

# /path/to/usbip-ssh root@raspberry-pi list
1-1  2109:3431  001/002  USB2.0 Hub
  1-1.4  00da:8510  001/004  Telink Wireless Receiver
      :1.0 030102 mouse   [usbhid] event4 event5 event6 hidraw0 mouse0
      :1.1 030101 kbd     [usbhid] event7 hidraw1
# /path/to/usbip-ssh verbose=1 root@raspberry-pi Telink
...

After which you can use the keyboard / mouse connected to the remote raspberry-pi machine as if they were connected to the local machine.

If that works, you set it to start automatically (e.g. from an /etc/boot.d script on Debian) with:

exec /path/to/usbip-ssh verbose=1 daemon root@raspberry-pi Telink

The daemon option will cause it to use syslog(3) instead of stderr and to keep trying (if e.g. the device/remote machine is not accessible, the device was plugged out, the connection was broken, etc), but spacing out the retries depending on how long the script has successfully run.

How does USB/IP work

Both the usbip_host driver (on the exporting/remote device) and vhci_hdc (on the local/importing device) work by tunneling the USB protocol over a socket file descriptor passed by a userland process; despite the "IP" in "USB/IP", the socket can be any kind of stream socket, including a unix domain socket created with socketpair(2).

Why this script has to suck so much then

Despite it being theoretically easy to use any reliable transport protocol for USB/IP (not just open tcp connections on a "secure" lan), limitations in ssh make everything much harder than it has to be: ssh is not able to forward simple file descriptors, nor use a unix domain socket for the stdin/out of the remote program (the only options being a pair of pipes or a pseudo-terminal).

The only way to access ssh's "channel" abstraction is by setting up a TCP or unix socket forwarding, and having to use that turns everything into a mess of master and slave ssh commands, temporary directories and socket files which have to be cleaned up, and extra processes which connect and listen to them and race against each other.