Raspberry Pi hints (and VirtualHere praise)

I wanted to post this in the hopes of saving others time and hassles. I have used the VirtualHere software/drivers in conjunction with my Ubuntu workstation and a windows 2008R2 terminal server which has been a nightmare for USB over IP devices. After trying numerous hardware devices (all of which do not support Win2k8 server but would function until causing random BSOD), I found VirtualHere. This software works like a dream, and the one device that has the most problems, a Panini check scanner, I have finally have a stable solution for my terminal server and all numerous warehouse/office devices (check scanner, document scanners, printers, and Windows Mobile sync devices/barcode scanners). I have had my Ubuntu workstation connection working perfectly with the check scanner and VirtualHere drivers without issue (bought a licence so I could use multiple devices also). I wanted to move away from my workstation and on to a simple device, so I choose the Raspberry Pi (which I have also used for a home media center) since VirtualHere offers host drivers for it

I ran into some very strange issues with the Raspberry Pi however. The check scanner when first plugged in presents as one device, and when the software is opened it changes to another device (I am guessing it uploads firmware every time). I had intermittent issues where the device would not load, the software would hang, it would load then not change to the other device, etc. I did discover that the power adapter made a difference on how bad the problem was (would work fine a couple times then back to unresponsive problems). Come to find out, it looks like the Pi has USB issues I did not know about (found this post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=5249&sid=92783df…). I had done a rpi-update about month-half ago, but made no difference. I just did another rpi-update today and presto! everything is working perfectly, tried dozens of times, unplug power, usb, etc, and no problems. I also tried the power adapter in addition to running off my computer USB port and both are stable. This is all in combination with the latest VirtualHere software, 1.7.4 as of this post (as older versions had more issues with Pi)

To add some icing to the cake, I have a VPN connection to the office, so with my home Ubuntu workstation, I decided to try with the handheld scanner that requires the Windows Mobile sync software, plugged in the scanner, pointed the server to my home workstation VPN address, and presto! worked like a charm without issue, so even over slow/high latency links (WAN) it appears to function perfectly

VirtualHere is phenomenal compared to other solutions, and being user space based and not kernel based, the stability is just amazing, and the flexibility of hosts is second to none