Networking Virtual CD drives

[BobS]

Well, I'm on a roll here this week and have been fortunate to have several
programs recommended by the group that were dead on for helping me out. I'm
going to press my luck and ask a question here that I asked in other groups
but received very little response.

There are a number of programs available for making virtual CD drives, both
free and otherwise. I have tried several and they work nicely. My problem
is that I want to be able to network these virtual drives and the only
solutions I've found so far are high-priced commercial programs. With the
ones I've tried so far, you can share the iso file as long as it's wrapped
in a folder that is then shared - and you map to it. The problem is, every
time you reboot, it does not reconnect and you manually have to remap the
drives.

The commercial programs run about $350 and for the small business I'm trying
to help out, that is not really a viable option. So something free would be
nice but if you know of a reasonably priced shareware version, that would
work also.

Now before everyone jumps on me saying that this is a freeware group only -
that's true but a lot of these software authors that give away some
excellent programs also have shareware products and if we're willing to take
their free offerings, we should also be willing to help support their
efforts. That helps keep freeware available.

Thank you,

Bob S.

 

[Steven Burn]

</snip>

Why don't you just set the "Re-connect at logon" option when mapping the
folder? (works fine for my network)

--
Regards

Steven Burn
Ur I.T. Mate Group
www.it-mate.co.uk

Keeping it FREE!

 

[BobS]

Steven,

For the sake of brevity, I did not write about all the various
configurations and multitude of other options I tried figuring - there must
be a way.. You can be sure that option was checked, software was installed
on the clients, iso images were correct (some like Easy CD do not make
compliant iso images) and that all the correct services are enabled.
Firewall turned off, anti-virus software temporarily disabled for test and
anything else I could think of.

From reading the commercial programs explanations, you do need a network
aware application. You can try this for yourself. Make an iso image and
try to map to it. You can't under WinXP. Now place it in a folder, share
the folder and now map to it. Be sure the virtual cd software is also on the
other computer. Now you should be able to open and work with the virtual CD
as though it was in the local pc's player. Now reboot.... The mapped folder
is there but the virtual CD needs to be remounted manually. Need something
like a Linux "Automount" program.

Even though I've used the "Persistent Mount" option in the virtual CD
programs I've tried, that only works if the image is on the local system -
not on the network.

Another option I'm investigating (and I've just started this today) is I've
installed a LinkSys (NLSU2) network storage file server on the clients
network. LinkSys has made the source code available to anyone that wants it.
There are a number of sites that have hacked this little gem (runs Linux)
and have turned it into a web server, iTunes server, ftp, mail server and a
number of other application type servers. I'm hoping to find someone who
has turned it into a virtual CD tower and get the code to play with. No
expert in programming and it's been many years but I used to program mainly
in Assembly, but have done some work in Cobol, Jovial, Business Basic, VB
and a couple of other - now defunct dialects of C. Not sure the learning
curve is worth the effort for this but it just may be a fun project if I
can't find a reasonable solution.

Thanks,

Bob S.

 

[Morten Skarstad]

Another option I'm investigating (and I've just started this today)
is I've installed a LinkSys (NLSU2) network storage file server on
the clients network. LinkSys has made the source code available to
anyone that wants it. There are a number of sites that have hacked
this little gem (runs Linux) and have turned it into a web server,
iTunes server, ftp, mail server and a number of other application
type servers. I'm hoping to find someone who has turned it into a
virtual CD tower and get the code to play with.

I have no idea if this is what you want, but the following should work:

Set up a computer with Linux. Other operating systems, such as FreeBSD or OS
X, should probably also work. You may or may not be able to use the your
LinkSys unit, but I don't really know much about it, so I can only
speculate.

Now, make a folder on the Linux box and make it available as a Windows share
using Samba. Upload you ISOs to another folder, and make mount points in
your shared folder for each and every CD. Mount the ISOs in the folders as
loopback devices. The contents of the CDs will now be available in the
folders. Since the folder is already shared (and probably mounted on your
Windows machines) these will also be able to access the contents of the
folders, and thus the contents of the CDs.

 

[BobS]

Morten,

Yes, I have read about this and willing to give it a try but it does seem to
be the long way around. But... we do have an older box sitting around that
we could do this on and make it into a Linux file server. That's why I'm
looking into seeing if anyone has done this using a NLSU2 and if so, about
$80 and a spare hard-drive gets me file server and I don't have a big
learning curve like I would have doing this from scratch. Your suggestion
certainly is viable and may be the way I go but for now, I'm going to look
around.

Whatever I end up doing will be posted here since there is damn little
information available about networking virtual drives.

Thank you,

Bob S.

 

[Christian 'CeeJay' Jensen]

Morten,

Yes, I have read about this and willing to give it a try but it does seem to
be the long way around. But... we do have an older box sitting around that
we could do this on and make it into a Linux file server. That's why I'm
looking into seeing if anyone has done this using a NLSU2 and if so, about
$80 and a spare hard-drive gets me file server and I don't have a big
learning curve like I would have doing this from scratch. Your suggestion
certainly is viable and may be the way I go but for now, I'm going to look
around.

Whatever I end up doing will be posted here since there is damn little
information available about networking virtual drives.

Wha platform will the clients be running ?

If it's windows you could install samba on the NLSU2 and mount the share
as a network drive on windows.
You can also get some applications that let you mount web or ftp folders
as windowsshares.

Then install Daemon-tools (free and the best virtual CD tool around IMO
, but as I'm a betatester on the project I must be considered biased).
I actually don't know if remounting networked drives will work in
Daemon-tools (I don't have a home-network so I can test) , but if it
doesn't then you can use Daemon-script to do so. (BTW if it doesn't ,
also tell me , and I'll suggest it to the developers as a feature ,
though they are busy right now with DT 4.00 )
It's a third-party tools for use with Daemon-tools.
http://www2.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php?mode=ViewCategory&catid=7

With that you can script anything Daemon-tools can do , and you can then
set the script to execute on bootup .. the simplest way would be to move
it into the startup folder.

 

[BobS]

Christian,

Good idea about using Samba and I have been doing some reading about that
over at Tom's Hardware / Networking site but this past week, they had some
problems and I couldn't get to the 5 part articles on how to do it. I think
that's the way I will go.

As for Daemon tools. Yes I tried them but you're limited to 4 virtual
drives and from what I've read in the forum, they will not be expanding it.
Quite frankly, the fella has a real attitude problem over there - and let's
everyone know it. Definitely don't want software that has a person with
that kind of an attitude behind it no matter if it's the best there is. I'd
be afraid of him deciding to get even with the world one of these days and
making an update available that spells nothing but trouble.

Daemon Tools does not support networking virtual CD's either. You should
take a look at the free offering from MS winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.zip
and ISORecorderSetup.msi by Alex Fienman (sp).

Thanks for your input and you may want to convince whatshisname about losing
the attitude. Freeware or not - no need for that attitude. If he's
burned-out, take a break from programming for awhile and get his life back
on track.

Bob S.