Sharing a DVD-ROM drive
 

I just set up a computer for my wife running Red Hat 8.0. My own box, with Debian Woody, has a DVD-ROM drive, and she would like to be able to watch DVDs on her machine using the drive on mine.

The two computers are not networked, but they are both connected to the same router for internet access. My question is, what would be the simplest way of enabling her machine to access the drive on mine? Would I need to set up mine as a server, or is there a simpler way? Can we do this through the existing router, or do I need to get a switch?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

It sounds like your router may already have a built in switch or hub. You possibly just neet to assign IP addresses.

I'm not sure what speed it eill need to be in order to get a decent DVD playback though. You may need to upgrade to a fast switch and or network cards. If it gets like this you would be as cheap buying another DVD player :)

Sorry, I forgot to mention that both computers have 10/100 Ethernet cards, and the router is switched. I get a transfer rate of 1.2 Mbps over the internet, so I expect they're fast enough. I'm just not sure how to go about it -- I can set up IP addresses easily enough, but after that, how do I tell Red Hat, "use the drive located on the computer at this IP"?

Thanks again...

It isn't something I use very much but I think NFS is the way to go.

Assuming your PC's are networked (you can ping the other machine etc) There is a detailed document about setting up NFS - client and server - here:
http://www.netsys.com/cgi-bin/display_article.cgi?1052

I still don't know if it will work with your DVD software (whether it will complain because the system doesn't actually have a DVD drive)

as long as you have good computers generally i'd say just use SSH to connect to the other system and run the app actually ON your machine but have it display on hers, playing DVD's you'd probably split the system usage 60/40 against the system with the drive (as there's still a lot of work to display the video on your wifes machine). this is what would happen by default with a standard ssh setup, so would be pretty trivial and should work out of the box. http://openssh.com

That should certainly solve any problems with running the DVD software on your wifee's PC.

Good thinking acid :)

Thanks to you both! I'll probably try SSH first, but after reading about NFS, I'm going to install that too just to play with. :)

How would one go about displaying this on another box? I mean, what would be an example of the syntax?:
mplayer -vo xv filename.avi
But won't that display on the box that is being ssh'd into?

:)

Cool

That's a good question -- I was too ignorant of SSH to even know to ask it. :) Or will the man pages address that? (I haven't looked yet, I confess...)

no it would connect to the local machine is x forwarding is enabled which is normally is.

http://www.videolan.org may be very suited to your situation.

nah, ALWAYS mplayer!... well vlc does have it's uses i guess.

Such as, say, streaming video from one machine to another? ;-)

Furthermore, Xine! Rah rah rah!

Faecal, that looks like the best (or simplest, anyway) solution yet. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

Xine? don't make me come over there.....