We have packaged the USB/IP userspace for Debian. The source package is maintained in a git repository on git.debian.org

The package is currently waiting in the Debian NEW queue.

Once the package enters unstable, we plan to upload a backport for Lenny to backports.org including a module source package (usbip-source) for use with 2.6.26 kernels.

USB/IP is a very promising USB device sharing system. It makes all kinds of USB devices accessible to other systems over TCP/IP.

As we are going to make more use of USB/IP both for ourselves and for LSE customers, we are starting to make some improvements.

One thing in particular that we're starting to work on is strong encryption to ensure confidentiality of the data transferred and for access control.

Naturally, those improvements will be contributed back to the USB/IP community and we hope to have them merged into the USB/IP upstream code.

We are working out a draft concept at the moment, you should be able to read more about it here and on the usbip-devel@lists.sourceforge.net mailinglist in a short while. :-)