I have small network with 5 machines running Mandrake 9.1 Linux and I have only one CD-ROM device on one of those machines. I want to share CD-ROM device so that it can be accessed from any of those networked machines.
I set sharing of directories using NFS and that works fine. I wonder if I can use NFS for sharing CD-ROM? I tried that but there was problem. I tried something like this: First I mount CD on local machine, say in directory /mnt/cdrom, and then I share that directory over network using NFS (by listing it in /etc/exports). Then on some other machine in network I remote mount that directory (/mnt/cdrom) using NFS. That works for now, I can access files from CD from the remote machine, but the problem is that after that I can't take out CD from CD-ROM drive. When I try to umount CD-ROM from local machine I get message "Device is busy". Even when I remote umount that directory from all machines in network that mounted it previously, I still get the same message "Device is busy" and I cant take CD out of drive, until reboot.
Lazy umount doesn't help either.

It would be nice if someone could throw few words of advice how to solve this problem or any other suggestions how to share CD-ROM over network.

That's right because the rpc.nfsd has a lock on it. I would just put a symlink to the /mnt/cdrom in some other nfs share that the users have mounted.

I tried it but it doesn't work. When I make symlink to /mnt/cdrom in one of the shared folders, link works only from local machine, where CD-ROM is actually mounted. When using that same link from remote machines it points to their local /mnt/cdrom folder where nothing is mounted and therefore shows empty folder. So I cant even access CD data from remote machines using that symlink.

Any other ideas how to solve this problem or share CD drive over network, using NFS or any other method?

Any ideas of sharing CD over linux network?
Maybe NFS is no good for this, maybe SAMBA? Or anything else? There must be some way, in windows it works flawlessly after 5 minutes.

Come on, any ideas?