At 10:57 29.01.1998 -0700, John wrote:
>HP had a product called CD Extensions that allowed sharing of the CD
>with PC clients, but dropped it after about a year.  So much for HP's
>guaranteed 5-year support life!

Well, the main problem of CD Extensions was that it only worked if
your PC used some "jurassic" type of (DOS) sockets and would not be
useful with Winsock based PC networking... (sigh)

> There may be a way to do it with Samba...

The CD Extensions issue was in fact the reason why Neil Harvey's posting
mentioning a piece of Un*x freeware called Samba made me so curious about
it that I gave it a try ("let's see if Posix on MPE/iX really allows to
port Unix software to MPE with reasonable effort... Oh, indeed!")     :-)

Unfortunately I haven't found the time to add CD access to Samba/iX
so far. I just had some "promising intercept XL experiments" (quite a
while ago) but nothing really usable so far.

Fortunately my colleague Holger Wiemann also got curious about accessing
the CDROM drive in our 3000 and finally created the CDCOPY utility (which
can be found on Jazz, I believe). At present I am using this as a quite
reasonable workaround to copy one or more CD's to disc (HFS namespace) and
then have Samba/iX serve those to the LAN PC's. (I can do this a long as
our system has quite some unused disc space...) -- By the way, I do exclude
the disc copies of the CD's from the backup, to not waste time and media!

Hope this helps.

Lars.

PS: Unlike CD Extensions/iX the above also works for non-LaserROM CD's.