Question

How do I connect a USB port to a droplet/vm?

I am attempting to connect a mobile phone running Android to my Debian 9 droplet for debugging. My host is a Mac running Mojave 10.14.6, and it has two USB ports.

When I run adb devices, I get an empty list (see this Stack Overflow post for details). dmesg returns only one USB: usb1 which is the Linux host controller. However, uhci_hcd lists 2 ports as detected, although usb2 is not detected anywhere else.

I haven’t found any similar issues despite much searching. This blog post has a recipe for detecting and mounting a USB hard drive, but I’m not sure that this is the solution I am looking for as fdisk -l does not show the USB device.

Could anyone advise on what my next steps should be?

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stationaryplant • October 21, 2019

Thanks! I ended up discovering this for myself, but it’s good to have it up in the forums.

As an aside, I did not know this question was even posted, as the screen was stuck on upload and never confirmed that it had been sent…

Bjorn van den Akker • October 20, 2019

Hi there @zeesy ,

This request is not possible. Since DigitalOcean provides VM’s that are remotely, you won’t be able to connect something like this. There are however some projects that encapsulate the USB bus over IP, see this post on Stack.

This blog post has a recipe for detecting and mounting a USB hard drive, but I’m not sure that this is the solution I am looking for as fdisk -l does not show the USB device This kind of post uses a local VM, you can create this using VirtualBox or something like Vsphere.

Hope this helps you.