When you say work computer, do you mean a company laptop monitored by an EDR solution with all Internet through the company VPN?I write all documentation in OneNote and then I have to drop the picture of the completed work on a SharePoint folder. Once it is in the folder, I copy the link to the photo and paste it into OneNote with my notes so it can be looked at by the auditors.
Since the pictures start on my phone, I use the Synology Photo app to automatically upload them to my NAS. Synology Photos keeps track of the pictures by year, geographic location, and Tags which I update with additional information, namely project number. When I am doing the documentation, I go into my NAS via a network drive. I find the pics, download them to a thumb drive, put the thumb drive in my work machine, and drag them over to the Sharepoint folder
What I would like to be able to do is access the photos like it was on an external hard drive on my company computer. I have software on my work machine that allows me to edit the picture, add the tag, etc. This is where the RP comes in, if I could view the photos and the the directory like a thumb drive, drag them directly into the SharePoint folder (like I currently do from the thumb drive), edit them if necessary, save the edits, and of course, refer to them in the event I need to talk to a contractor about something I saw, that would be perfect.
As I said it is a lot of photos, I am guessing a minimum of 20 and some jobs as much as 300. I have all of the Southeast US (6 states) and about 40 projects a year.
I hope that provides a good picture of my process.
The VPN used here only routes connections to work computers. Everything not going to work computers routes onto the local LAN or to the Internet using NAT on the residential router. In this case there are no difficulties connecting to the VPN and home NAS at the same time.
Would it be possible to plug an Ethernet dongle into the laptop and configure it to connect to the NAS? Presumably not.
In this case you might try a Pi that talks over USB as an MTP responder.
https://github.com/viveris/uMTP-Responder
To do this with a Pi 5 you need to repurpose the USB-C power connector for data. First figure out how to feed power to the Pi through the two 5V pins on the GPIO connector. Then use the data lines in the USB-C port to create a USB gadget acting as an MTP responder.
If lucky, it should take about three days to get this working. I've never tried, so maybe never.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Tue Feb 13, 2024 3:01 am
