[kotaKat]

https://scsipub.com/blog/an-esp32-as-a-network-attached-usb-...

Apparently, exposing small USB sticks to industrial equipment that uses it for loading/saving configs and screenshots and being able to 'network' it with shared iSCSI drives.

"The scope writes screen_001.png to “USB”; the file appears in a directory on my desktop, in the iSCSI overlay. Combined with a dropbox-style sync I no longer need to walk over and pull the stick out."

Quite brilliant and clever, if you ask me.

I'm wondering now about using an ESP32 stick and an iSCSI image of Windows install media - that could make for some fun in-house computer imaging setups.

[qdotme]

That was indeed one of the main drivers for it! ESP32 (especially with 2.4GHz WiFi latencies) is not super well suited for OS installs, but... many UEFI firmwares (and some network drivers!) will let you boot iSCSI directly.

The other one is the Raspberry Pi{3,4,5} iSCSI shim linked there as well - I have a bunch of them for a bunch of paying clients CI/CD kinds of work, and I wanted these to boot from network, not from microSD.

Both of these projects could've benefited from a public demo iSCSI endpoint, we have http://example.com and [e-mail] - why not iSCSI

[kotaKat]

Ah, yeah, drat. I forgot entirely about the moonshot that becomes streaming several GB through the ESP... I was just thinking of an easier solution that avoids UEFI networking - wireless devices, tablets, odd things like that ;)

Then again this might still be useful yet - a small 64MB thumb drive with an autounattend.xml streamed to it is also an equally powerful tool for some Windows shenanigans.

[qdotme]

The Pi4 shim actually exposes USB device as well. This works way, way better (and IMHO mostly because wired network is better than wireless for latency, ESP32’s feeble CPU aside)