Topic: sharing cdroms; what's wrong with ibays?

[Robert]

Every once in a while the topic of sharing cdroms comes up in these forums. Posters of these topics are usually referred to the contrib module that allows sharing a cdrom through samba. This solution is not suitable for all networks, e.g. it doesn't work for networks that include appletalk clients. Besides, e-smith has long had a mechanism for making resources available for file sharing through samba, appletalk and ftp: the ibay. Why not use that to share the contents of a cd-rom inserted in the e-smith server with the rest of the network? I've used this method for quite some time now and wondered why it hadn't been suggested in these forums before. Here's what I do:
-Create an ibay for sharing your cd-rom. In the ibay web panel you can indicate whether or not you want to share it through ftp. In the example below the ibay is called cd4all.
-Insert a cd-rom and mount it onto the files directory of your freshly created ibay, like so:

mount /dev/cdrom /home/e-smith/files/ibays/cd4all/files/

Now the contents of the cdrom is available for samba, appletalk, and (depending on ibay configuration) ftp clients on your network.
-To remove the cd-rom from your server, simply type

eject

Unmounting and ejecting the cdrom will only work if there are no client connections to the cd-rom.

If you're really lazy you could make a shell script to mount the cd-rom. I've never looked into automounting, but I suppose it could be configured for this set-up.

[Justin]

Rob have you tried this technique with a cd writer?

I am wondering what would happen if you made the ibay writable and then used some packet writing software to write across the LAN.
 
It would make for a nice feature.

Justin.

[Robert]

Justin wrote:
>
> Rob have you tried this technique with a cd writer?
>
> I am wondering what would happen if you made the ibay
> writable and then used some packet writing software to write
> across the LAN.
>  
> It would make for a nice feature.
>
> Justin.

That does sound good. Too good to be true, perhaps. It would certainly require a whole lotta tweaking. But it won't be me tweaking it.

[Robert]

BTW, Justin, while the feature you proposed is not going to be easy to achieve, there is another nice trick you can do with my technique that doesn't require any tweaking, and that's streaming MP3s from a cd-rom in your server. For this you will need Adrian Chung's Jukebox add-on. Here's how to do this:
-instead of mounting the cd-rom onto the files directory of the ibay, you mount it onto the html directory.
-now MP3-enable this ibay in the jukebox panel of the e-smith-(web)manager.
-point your browser to http://servername/ibayname and you're presented with a list of all MP3 files on the cd-rom, just as you would if they were on a hard disk. You can fetch or stream these.

There is a big BUT: MP3-enabling the html directory of an ibay somehow locks it. If this html directory is the mount point of a cd-rom, it means you can't eject the cd-rom as long as it's MP3-enabled. You have to disable MP3-serving from the cd-rom ibay (in the jukebox panel) before you can unmount and/or eject the cd-rom. That's a bit of a pain. Maybe you or someone else can come up with a fix for this.

[geoff]

This may be of interest (never tried it myself though)

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/jhaeger/webCDwriter/

G