Mounting a local Windows CD drive to a remote Linux system?
 

Is it even possible? I don't know of a way to do it.

The situation is say all I have is a windows machine and I remotely connected via ssh to a Linux machine. Is there a way I can mount my local CD-rom on the remote Linux machine?

You can do it by enabling the sharing on the drive from the Windows machine, and then mount it on the Linux box using samba.

Yea thats fine if the remote Linux machine is on the same network. What if The remote machine is off site? Like say the Remote machine is at a client location.

Yep, that raises the bar!

You can of course open up the SMB port to the big bad internet, but this has security hairs on it.

How about the following (I haven't tried this, it is a bit convoluted):

• Run an openssh server on the Windows box
• Set up a reverse ssh tunnel so that the Linux box can ssh back to the Windows machine (this is to temporarily bypass the client firewall without resorting to changing the firewall port forwarding)
• From the Linux box, set up an sshfs to the Windows machine to mount the CDROM.

It strikes me it would be easier to just scp the contents of the CDROM to the Linux machine :)

VPN is the way to access non-routable protocols. If you don't care about security then might mount it nfs tools. It is a huge package but they have services for unix.

Might try running remote desktop and remote access tools like adobe's connectnow and other remote tools.

Could mount it with portable xampp to a http page or ftp site. Similar to xitami or even the older free barracudadrive server.

Bet there is 10 more ways or so.

So the basic issue is how do you want to access your system and then choose a format to use that access.

neonsignal,
That is a really good idea doing a reverse ssh tunnel. I haven't thought about that. Previously I either sent a copy of the disc to the client and had them physically insert it into the machine or I made an iso and hosted it on my web server till I could get it downloaded and mounted. Then I deleted the iso from my web server. Just a bit time consuming doing that.

Jefro,
I bet you are right there are probably 100 ways of doing this task. Thats the joy of Linux, there is always more than than 1 way of doing something. I guess from a security stand point a VPN tunnel would be best.