How would I go about installing several (3-4) cd burners and using them simutaneously. Could I just write a scirpt to make cdrecord start each at the same time. Has anyone tried this? Are there any problems that might arise? Thanks in advance.

Well, with cdrecord you need to specify what the target device is to be (that ID you get from scanning the bus) so firing off multiple cdrecord processes to write simultaneously shouldn't be that hard.
No, never tried it. Problems? You mean other than with the RIAA? ;-) Well, if all these CD/RW devices are on a shared bus, you could easily wind up with a bunch of coasters if you can't keep the data flowing to the burners fast enough. If you have a means of measuring how the bus that feeds the burners is performing you should be able to make an educated prediction on how many burners you can be running simultaneously before you can expect problems. I'd say that you would have more luck doing this with SCSI than IDE.

Good luck,

Rick

Okay, that all sounds good. Assuming I go with SCSI, is there a limit to how many SCSI controllers I can through in my computer? besides the number of card slots that is. I've never used it before. And, just to clarify, this is for medium-scale software distribution, of my own software, so there isn't any copyright infringement going on.

You are also limited by the number of IRQ's you have left. How many burners do you want to use at once? The Adaptec 29160 is a dual channel card with 15 channels each. In theory thats 30 drives on one card. However the SCSI bus (per channel) total length is limited to somewhere on the order of 6 meters. For your needs you proabaly would want a SCSI chassis.

There are also standalone CD duplicators you might be able to use.

It depends on the controller and the driver. I have used some older NCR controllers don't want to coexist with one another in a PC while you can run several of them in an Alpha without any trouble. If you look at the README.drivername files in /usr/src/linux-XXX/drivers/scsi (should be the correct place, I'm going from memory) there are sometimes notes on how to run a second (or third) controller of the same type. Or, if you have some money available I have to believe that a pair of Ultra160 controllers would be more than able to keep enough data flowing to four CD/RW drives. But at a few hundred bucks apiece you've got to really want and need to do this. And take into account that SCSI burners are getting more difficult to find; at least at a reasonable price. An older UltraSCSI controller could probably handle a pair of older burners at less cost. (Again, if you can find them.)
So when's gbradux coming out? Is it a Red Hat derivative?

:-)

Here's a suggestion that will probably not work, but be worth trying once . When specifying cdrecord, maybe specify multiple devices:
cdrecord -scanbus

Let's say it brings up 0,1,0 0,3,1 0,4,5 as your burners. So then:
cdrecord dev=0,1,0 dev=0,3,1 dev=0,4,5 speed=x

Might be worth a shot, I'd try it with CDRW's at first to make sure MasterC doesn't cost you several CDR's

Cool

CD/R RAID?

(hee hee)

Actually this is for some informational, activism software. But I am on a small (24 person) team working on a suite of apps that will eventually be a Ximian-like change of Gnome--which includes an Aqua-like dock with SVG support. We'll be making our first release in a few months. I'll post more info then.