jarvis@psych.toronto.edu (Brian Jarvis) (02/21/91)
My experience with CD-ROM drives and drivers is somewhat limited, so
please bear with me...
My department is considering obtaining a subscription to PsycLIT, a
CD-ROM series containing approximately 16 years worth of psychology
abstracts.
We would like to purchase the SunCD drive which Sun Microsystems is pushing
on a special promotional offer, at $995 before March 15. We would attach
this to our Sun 3/280. We have about 50 PC's around the office equipped
with Sun's PC-NFS and Beame & Whiteside's BW-NFS software. The desired
goal is to be able to allow the PC's using the NFS software to read and
search through the PsycLIT ROM inside the SunCD drive.
The PsycLIT system requires an IBM PC compatible computer, 640 K of RAM,
MS-DOS 2.1 or higher and Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions.
Questions:
1) Has anyone successfully been able to read UNIX CD-ROM drives via NFS from
PC's?
2) Is it possible for the search & retreival software to operate across
NFS in this fashion?
3) Does it matter whether or not the PC's search & retreival software is
meant for a standalone or network system? That is, will the Sun server
perform the necessary locking and blocking required automatically, or
is other magic required?
4) Does this sound vaguely do-able? Is there something else I should be
looking at?
All pointers would be helpful!
Thanks!
Brian
--
Brian A. Jarvis, Rm. 4026, Sidney Smith Hall, Dept. of Psychology,
jarvis@psych.toronto.edu University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
System Administrator M5S 1A1 (416) 978-3948