[Web4lib] Networking legacy CD-based resources

[Mike Taylor]

Deeds, Leland writes:
 > Our library still has a number of resources that are available only
 > on CD, and which for a number of reasons are not going to be
 > replaced by online versions. Several years ago these products were
 > all delivered on a networked CD tower. After the demise of that
 > piece of hardware, the resources were made available in a limited
 > fashion on a couple of computers in our Reference area.
 > 
 > We would like to find a way of making these resources available to
 > users over the network, again, from our servers by using a CD
 > emulation tool.  My predecessor had evaluated a software package by
 > FarStone Technologies in 2005, it appears, but this only runs in a
 > Windows environment. Our servers are all running Linux.
 > 
 > Can anyone recommend to us software that will run on a Linux server
 > that would allow managed, network access to products originally on
 > CD? Any information would be greatly appreciated.

The simplest approach would be to keep ISO images of each CD on the
Unix server, mount each of these images using loopback and the ISO
9660 filesystem.  Then make the mounted filesystem available to client
computers using whatever technology you usually use (NFS, Samba?).

Here, for example, is how I just looked inside the image of an old Red
Hat Linux installation CD that I happen to have lying around:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ cd /hulk/archives/home-directory/hulk/mike/download/
$ ls -l
total 1158936
-rw-r--r-- 1 201 users 668499968 2002-08-30 17:31 valhalla-i386-disc1.iso
$ mkdir valhalla-i386-disc1
$ sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 valhalla-i386-disc1.iso valhalla-i386-disc1
$ ls valhalla-i386-disc1
EULA                  RELEASE-NOTES-de.html     RELEASE-NOTES.ja
GPL                   RELEASE-NOTES-es.html     RELEASE-NOTES.ko
README                RELEASE-NOTES-fr.html     RELEASE-NOTES.zh_CN
README-Accessibility  RELEASE-NOTES-it.html     RELEASE-NOTES.zh_TW
README.de             RELEASE-NOTES-ja.html     RPM-GPG-KEY
README.es             RELEASE-NOTES-ko.html     RedHat
README.fr             RELEASE-NOTES-zh_CN.html  TRANS.TBL
README.it             RELEASE-NOTES-zh_TW.html  autorun
README.ja             RELEASE-NOTES.de          boot.cat
README.ko             RELEASE-NOTES.es          dosutils
README.zh_CN          RELEASE-NOTES.fr          images
README.zh_TW          RELEASE-NOTES.html
RELEASE-NOTES         RELEASE-NOTES.it
$  
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hope this helps.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike at indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "rm() { /bin/rm -f $*; echo 'Were you sure?'; }" -- Tee-shirt
	 at a Unix conference.