paul@aucs.uucp (Paul Steele) (01/02/90)
The boss wants to a CD-ROM service on our Appletalk network so that
users can access a networked shareable CD-ROM player over the network.
Is there any way to accomplish this sort of thing in a Mac/Appletalk
environment. We would rather not have to dedicate a Mac to the service,
but if its necessary then we will. We do provide such a service to
our Novell PC users, but that CD-ROM is not available to the Appletalk
network. The PC CD-ROM player also holds upto 4 CD's at a time, which
is something we would like on the Mac side as well.
Any information on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
--
Paul H. Steele UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai}!cs.dal.ca!aucs!Paul
Acadia University BITNET: Paul@Acadia or PHS@Acadia (preferred)
Wolfville, NS Internet: Paul@AcadiaU.CA
CANADA B0P 1X0 (902) 542-2201x587blob@apple.com (Brian Bechtel) (01/04/90)
In article <1990Jan2.151626.7868@aucs.uucp> paul@aucs.uucp (Paul Steele) writes: > The boss wants to a CD-ROM service on our Appletalk network so that > users can access a networked shareable CD-ROM player over the network. > Is there any way to accomplish this sort of thing in a Mac/Appletalk > environment. We would rather not have to dedicate a Mac to the service, > but if its necessary then we will. AppleShare 2.0.1 supports CD-ROM and other read-only media. You can have up to 7 SCSI CD players attached to one server. It works well. This does require that you dedicate a Mac as a server. I don't know about other solutions. As for a multi-disc CD player, there may be such a beast out there, but I haven't heard of anything widely available. Panasonic recently announced a 6-disc CD-ROM player; perhaps they have a Macintosh driver available. --Brian Bechtel blob@apple.com "My opinion, not Apple's"
hpoppe@bierstadt.ucar.edu (Herb Poppe) (01/04/90)
In article <6004@internal.Apple.COM> blob@apple.com (Brian Bechtel) writes: >AppleShare 2.0.1 supports CD-ROM and other read-only media. You can have >up to 7 SCSI CD players attached to one server. It works well. This does >require that you dedicate a Mac as a server. I don't know about other >solutions. >... Can the CD's be ejected and mounted without taking the server down? Herb Poppe NCAR INTERNET: hpoppe@ncar.ucar.edu (303) 497-1296 P.O. Box 3000 CSNET: hpoppe@ncar.CSNET Boulder, CO 80307 UUCP: hpoppe@ncar.UUCP
ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley) (01/05/90)
In article <5877@ncar.ucar.edu> hpoppe@bierstadt.UCAR.EDU (Herb Poppe) writes: > In article <6004@internal.Apple.COM> blob@apple.com (Brian Bechtel) writes: > >AppleShare 2.0.1 supports CD-ROM and other read-only media. > >Can the CD's be ejected and mounted without taking the server down? No. That's one of the downsides of putting a CD drive on an AppleShare server. Additionally, network users won't be able to hear sound from any CD-ROMs that produce it (including the "Explorer Disc" that comes with the AppleCD SC drive). Using CDs on a server requires some setup ahead of time. You must boot the server from the Server Administration floppy, mount a CD in the drive, and then run AppleShare Admin so that the server can "prepare" that particular CD for use as a server volume. This process has to be repeated for every CD that you have. Fortunately, you can do that for every CD that you have all in one session. AppleShare will remember the privileges that it created for each CD, even if it isn't mounted in the drive at the moment. (AppleShare Admin will present a message like "Save access privileges for (CD name) even though this volume isn't being used right now?") We have a Novell server with a CD drive on our PC network here. On Novell, you can switch disks anytime without taking the server down. It apparently just thinks of the CD drive as any other disk drive, allowing shared access to whatever CD is in it at the moment. I'd like to see that kind of functionality in AppleShare. -John --- John O'Malley / Macintosh / Purdue University / (317) ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu / Specialist / Computing Center / 494-1787
dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (01/05/90)
In article <1990Jan2.151626.7868@aucs.uucp> paul@aucs.UUCP (Paul Steele) writes: > The boss wants to a CD-ROM service on our Appletalk network so that > users can access a networked shareable CD-ROM player over the network. > Is there any way to accomplish this sort of thing in a Mac/Appletalk > environment. This should not be difficult. Attach a CD-ROM player to one Mac on your network. Install copies of TOPS or an equivalent on this Mac, and on each Mac that you wish to permit to have access to the CD-ROM. Configure the "server" Mac so that the CD-ROM is mounted at boot time, and is then published as a read-only volume by TOPS. > We would rather not have to dedicate a Mac to the service, > but if its necessary then we will. I don't think you'll _have_ to dedicate a Mac as a server. However, you should place the CD-ROM drive on a machine that is not used heavily, or for time-critical functions. CD-ROM access is slow, and the Mac acting as a server will be locked up during I/O to the drive. If you're expecting heavy use of the CD-ROM drive, you should dedicate a Mac Plus (or a similar low-end machine) as a server... and turn the size of the RAM cache up! > We do provide such a service to > our Novell PC users, but that CD-ROM is not available to the Appletalk > network. The PC CD-ROM player also holds upto 4 CD's at a time, which > is something we would like on the Mac side as well. I have not seen any Mac-compatible CD-ROMs with jukebox capabilities, nor any CD-ROM driver that would take advantage of same. > Any information on this subject would be greatly appreciated. If you're serious about providing CD-ROM service over the net, you should be careful to select a fast CD-ROM drive... otherwise, people aren't going to be happy with the throughput. Unfortunately, Apple's CD SC drive isn't very fast, as CD-ROM drives go. By the standards of the drives coming on the market today, it's rather slow. I recently purchased a Toshiba XM-3201 CD-ROM drive... average access time is in the 400 millisecond range. Toshiba says it's [one of] the fastest CD-ROM drives on the market. I can't say as to that... but it feels much snappier than the Apple CD SC I played with for a while last year. I've found that AppleShare is _not_ a good mechanism for providing network access to a CD-ROM. AppleShare's "Desktop Manager" doesn't get along very well with large, read-only volumes which were built in a non-Desktop-Manager environment. If a CD-ROM (for example) has a normal HFS "Desktop" file, but does not have the Desktop Manager database files, the Finder will be unable to access it if the Desktop Manager is installed, and the CD-ROM will be declared to be unmountable. I believe that TOPS would not have this problem, since TOPS does not include the Desktop Manager. I'm not sure about IPT's AppleShare-compatible server package (PSN, I think?). A note on all of the above... what I've said applies to mounting and publishing a CD-ROM which was mastered as an HFS disk volume. I'm not sure what will happen if you attempt to mount/publish a High Sierra or ISO 9660 CD-ROM. Since these volumes do not have Desktop files, TOPS clients may be unable to use them. -- Dave Platt VOICE: (415) 493-8805 UUCP: ...!{ames,apple,uunet}!coherent!dplatt DOMAIN: dplatt@coherent.com INTERNET: coherent!dplatt@ames.arpa, ...@uunet.uu.net USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303