CD-ROM's and PC-NFS



For sometime here at Bangor, we have been running diskless PC's with

Sun's PC-NFS software. The PC's remote boot using the BOOTP protocol

from a number of machines including HP's, Sun's and Vaxen running

Multinet from TGV. It is possible on all these machines to mount

various CD-ROM and export them as disks to the PC's which can mount

them.



This is great except that the most search software and application

software which is run on DOS machines using CD-ROM's requires the

existence of the MicroSoft CD-rom EXtensions (MSCDEX) before they can

run. This is a TSR which provide attach points to the physical device

driver shipped with the cd-rom drive itself.



Until recently it was rare for the DOS search software to use more

than 2 of the function provided by MSCDEX; one to find out if MSCDEX

is loaded and what version the other which drive is the CD-ROM drive.



Thus it was possible to write a dummy TSR which provided these

function.  Such a dummy TSR was written by Digital Solutions, of

Queensland Australia, who made it available to the public domain

earlier this year.  This saved alot of work on my part !!. It works

very well which most of the English, text based CD-ROM allowing the

software provided with the CD-ROM to work first time. Here at Bangor

we provide Whitaker's "Book's in Print", which uses BRS/search, "CAB"

,which uses Silver Platter software plus one or two others that users

want occasionally.



With some more recent CD-ROM's they are also trying to detect the

"Unique Volume ID" on each CD-ROM. This is much harder to fake as it

varies from CD to CD but probably could be added in without too many

problems, but the source code for the MXSUB utility, which produced the

dummy MXCDEX stubs used by applications, written by Digital solutions,

is not available and so a rewrite of it will be ncessary.



I have been more interested in providing the audio services as well as

the text services avialable on the CD-ROM. The approach I'm taking to

these problems is as follows

  

  There is a public domain Client-Server CD-ROM software avialable

for reading DD1 Electronic Books on CD-ROM available from

  nic.cic.net:/pub/netsoftware/deserver-2.0.tar.Z

which provide a nice mechanism for sharing CD-ROM info with less

powerful clients.

  Also there are several control programs for CD-ROM drivers on

Sun's which run as X widgets which also provide audio connections,

the best of which is a thing call Xcdplayer which can be found all

over the place using the "archie" archive searcher.



Hopefull with the addition of the now beta-testing V3 socket libraries

provided for PC-NFS it should be possible to provide an rpc connection

mechanism to pass on MSCDEX calls. If I am sucessful down this route

I will of course let you know.



All of the above programs mentions are in the public domain and most

come with source.