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Huh. The Remarkable2 tablet has a USB port for charging, but if you plug it into a PC it shows up as an ethernet adapter.

So then you can SSH into it.

that's an interesting approach to PC connectivity. Why be a serial port or a mass storage device when you can just be ETHERNET, with a virtual network to the tablet.

the SSH is also weird: It's not a fixed password. It apparently generates a random password, and if you go into the menus (Menu->Settings->Help->Copyright and licences) it'll tell you the SSH password it generated

I guess that's a good (or at least not terrible?) way to do it. It's slightly more secure, you're not going to get hacked by someone SSHing into your tablet because you're on their wifi, but anyone with physical access can SSH in if they need to

still you could have skipped all of this and just made it a serial port. you don't need authentication if it's a serial port.

you will not regret giving your USB device a serial port

I guess doing it this way makes it possible to reuse the same functionality to connect to the device from both wifi and USB? Since it's just some kind of linux machine.

@foone and it means you can scp and rsync without anything fancy.

@tithonium @foone and they have a built in web server that runs on that interface to drag&drop files between the device and your big computer

@jpm @tithonium @foone How well does the USB ethernet approach play with typical OS network configuration? Is there a DHCP server that assigns an address without a default route? Does it interfere with normal real network traffic? What if the assigned address collides with something on existing real LAN?

@dalias @jpm @tithonium @foone also this is all in the kernel so it's probably effectively free for them to enable on the remarkable

@tedmielczarek @jpm @tithonium @foone Right, but clashing address would still prevent you from accessing the same-address device on LAN. Zeroconf sounds kinda viable but slow to come up waiting for DHCP to timeout, no? IPv6 only would be ideal but I doubt they were brave enough to do that..