🚀 go-pugleaf

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
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