CD rom / linux

[Erik Corry]

> A related question: I would like to build a CD-Rom server based on Samba where
> it is possible to swap CDs without mounting them by hand. The volume label should
> appear automatically in Windows. Is this possible ? 

Assuming you are using Linux, a good start for this might be the
supermount patches from Stephen Tweedie.  After you install this (you
may need to do a one-line patch to the CD-ROM code to disable door
locking) you can just add and remove CDs as you like and they will
simply appear and disappear from your filesystem.

See <ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/sct/linux/supermount>. It hasn't
been updated for a while (Stephen has been busy with robustifying ext2
against disk errors among other things), but I think it still patches
more or less cleanly into 2.0 kernels. I haven't had any trouble
with it, though admittedly I haven't stressed it.

I'm not sure how you would get the volume label to appear in Windows.
There's probably an ioctl you could poll on the CDROM device to get
the label (assuming it's cached, and not reread from the CD every time),
but how do you tell the SMB users the label?

-- 
Erik Corry ec at sign-tronic.dk - I do not speak for Sign-Tronic A/S