What's the Best Way to Build a Linux CD-Rom JukeBox 15
An Anonymous Coward asks:
"Picture this: a mega SCSI based
server box with a bunch of cd-rom drives.
What's the best way to build this beast
so that it can serve iso-9660 and hfs CDs
to smb/cifs, nfs and appletalk clients?
Is there any particular way to deal with
SCSI IDs and LUNs? Is there an easy way to
improve request performance by caching on
disk or RAM?" Hey...sounds like an
interesting topic!
Use a hard disk. (Score:1)
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Random comments (Score:1)
If you want lots and lots of cds you might need to use devfs if you run out of devices. Hardware to look at if you're rolling your own would be the Mylex BT-930 which is a cheap dual channel ultra narrow controller, or maybe the Diamond Dual Fireport 40 if you can find them. You can also find preassembled cd towers which translate the scsi ids to LUNs so you get more mileage out of your scsi cards. www.corpsys.com usually sells this sort of stuff, although you pay for it.
CD-ROM server with cheap hardware? (Score:1)
3 or 4 double-speed panasonic cd drives that i've managed to get. i was thinking of using mars_nwe to enable the CDs to be mounted from my win98 clients. Any other ideas?
CD-ROM server with cheap hardware? (Score:1)
Also we have NetWare servers where I work, and actually getting to set up the server and clients myself should give me some good insight.
What about different filesystems? (Score:1)
Microtest Discport2, VT, or Zerver... (Score:1)
It's a tiny computer with a scsi interface that will run cds, dvds, cdr, and scsi hard drives. It'll cache images of cds or dvds to disc and serve them up with samba (or novell, or mac, or whatever). It's administered through a web interface, and is a pretty slick little number. Looks cool, too.
One version is an external unit with a built in hard drive, and external scsi connector. Another is a smaller external device with no hard drive and just the scsi. Yet another is an internal unit (to put into a drive tower) with both the scsi and 2 ide channels. So, you could build a 7 bay cd tower with it. But instead of 7 cdrom drives, put the Zerver in the top slot, then a cdrom, then a cdr drive, then a dvd drive. Then polish it off with 3 nice, fat scsi drives. (figure about 4GB for 7 cds or so, to be safe.)
Nifty little thing. The ones without hard drives cost about $750-800. After trying it out, we're going to get two of them. (We already have the cd towers, so it's the best thing for us, anyway.)
Or build your own linux box and do the same thing with it. Cache images of cds to disk and serve them up with samba. I kinda like this cute blue box that does exactly that out of the box by itself. (And is smaller than my phone!)
Found it at http://www.microtest.com
No, I don't work for them or anything. It looked like a good idea, and they had a 30 day free trial. So I tried it out, and it works great. (Sending it back is REALLY going to suck.)
No Subject Given (Score:1)
They came with some crappy Novell emulation type software, we finally got annoyed enough and went Linux.. The hardware is kind of expensive, but rock solid and cool looking on the server racks
The bigger tower has a pentium 166, 64 meg of ram and a 1.6 gig HD, the other has a 486sx25, but I was having a problem with IDE controllers on the 486 so I had to bastardize an old P100 with 16 meg of ram and use that for a controller for the CD drives.
The 166 runs great off of its internal mboard. The smaller tower has 2 Adaptec 1542 scsi cards, the big one has 2 Adaptec 7870's.. the LUNS were all handled by the OS w/o any hitches at all.. If I remember correctly I did have to manually create the
Anyways all the CD's are mounted, then exported via Samba(would be just as easy with Appletalk and/or NFS) and users are authenticated via our NT Domain.. we went from 2 to 3 CD lockups a day that had to be manually reset to zero downtime other than to swap CD's when new ones arrived...... CD's in the tower are only quad speeds, but performs great from the far side of our network.. seems like it is your local CD drive... no problems running AVI's and stuff across a couple of 10 meg routers.
One note on performance... 16 meg does not seem to be a problem on the smaller tower. It dips into its 20 meg swap file occasionally, but I have not noticed any performance problems..maybe someday I should slap some more memory in it if I think of it. There are a couple of caching options you can set to really improve Samba performance on Static file systems.. one is setting get wide cache, and there is another one I can't think of right now but can look up if you are interested... they do seem to make quite a diff. on previously accessed CD's.
Anyways upshot of all this typing is that they really rock under Linux... saved us a bundle over trying to buy the companies "new improved" NT or Novell based access solutions...
cheapo cdrom servers (Score:1)
$.02
Big HardDrive, SCSI or IDE (Score:1)
if you have the money for it SCSI drives would give you better performance.
Using a disk you don't have to wait for the cdrom's to spin up when you request information, because it's already 'cached' on the disks.
anyway, that's my $0.02
I found the Jukebox from Heaven (Score:1)
Thats my 5cents worth