[KLUG Members] Sharing a DVD Burner

[Bruce Smith]

> > Hey all... I have a DVD Burner on my SUSE 9.2 box..
> > and I can see it through my Network Neighborhood via
> > Samba on my windows machine. It looks like a folder
> > and not a CD/DVD drive though. Is there a way of
> > having it be viewed as a CD/DVD drive so I can
> > possibly burn from my windows machine as well? 
> 
> For a long while CD Burners were something that suffered from buffer
> under-runs (if the reading process didn't read quick enough then the
> write would fail).
> 
> If this is the case with DVDs (which I suspect it is) then no.  Even at
> 100 Mbs you would not have enough bandwidth to send data to the DVD
> Burner.  Furthermore, most commercial CD/DVD Burning software is
> designed to work with SCSI emulated devices.

You might be able to do it with something like iSCSI which does SCSI
emulation/sharing over a network.  (provided you can get drivers for
your version of Windows, and you might have to patch/recompile your
Linux kernel)

I have one geek'ish friend that uses iSCSI to share SCSI tape drives
between Linux & Windows for backups on a GB network (100BT won't cut
it).  He said it works for every SCSI device he's tried.  So it should
work for burning CD/DVD's too.  (in theory, YMMV :)
(Did I mention he does this at his home? ;-)

You also might need a true SCSI burning device too, since I don't know
if you can combine Linux IDE-SCSI emulation with iSCSI.

> I have heard of some web applications that allow you to upload an ISO
> File to the system and burn a CD Via a web interface.  Alternatively you
> could alway upload the files to the Linux host (using say SCP) and then
> use Linux utilities via SSH to burn the files.

That would be the much easier solution!  :-)

But, I'm sure it'd make a great KLUG presentation if you can get it
working with iSCSI !!!   ;-)

 - BS