I am trying to setup a linux box that with be able to distribute multiple cd or dvd images. The only thing I have been able to find is this CDServer-HOWTO.

Is this what I am looking for or is there something else out there?

Thanks for the help.

sorry if i'm missing something, but a CD server is just a file server with cd images on it... what special functinality are you looking for over samba / nfs?

You are looking for a file server.

It will be going into a school. I'd like to have all the cd/dvd the school will use on this server. Hopefully this will reduce lost cd/dvd and such.

yeah, so that's just samba and nfs. i guess you could be looking at some sort of web interface to mount different images on the fly, but i would think that just permanently mounting them would be more suitable, or maybe a proxy through autofs could add a little bit of dynamism to remove and configuration after the initial build.

You could also try http://www.freenas.org/
It's a great and easy to use file server with web administration based on FreeBSD.

I've used Debian and SME successfully for file servers too.

so I can make each cd/dvd it's own nfs/samba share. then have each machine access the cd/dvd they need as needed. Is there any way to automated the machine accessing the shares? This needs to be pretty simple because it is for younger kids.

well you can, but i'd wonder where the benefit of a seperate share really would be though, why not just have a single share with a directory for each? the usability for the end user is really very straight forward.

If you are interested in making it more sophisticated on the management side you might want to look at this http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Auto_mo...)#Config_files which does give a small example of the scenario i mentioned above. normally you'd use an /etc/fstab entry for each iso, which kinda sucks really. instead you can use autofs to map directories automatically.

for example you have a directory /var/iso/ which contains your iso images. you then have a blank directory /var/cds on which autofs lives. now it *should* be fairly simple to configure autofs to say that should someone wish to access an "example" cd, they go to the path of /var/cds/example (via nfs / samba etc...) and autofs takes that directory request and attempts to mount /var/iso/example.iso at that location. this sort of scenario means that you have to do absolutely nothing to integrate a new iso into the system that to drop it into the iso directory, and the rest is implicit. you do have the missing link of getting them to access the right path (as it wouldn't normally exist to click on) but in general, it'd be a very hands off mechanism.

acid_kewpie, thanks for the link.

I finally got autofs working after many frustrating hours. For some reason I though autofs should run on the server instead of the client box. Once I put autofs on the client box and configured the files it worked like a charm. There is only last question/problem I have.

I was unable to use autofs to mount files from a remote nfs box. It will mount them from a nfs mount to the local machine. What am I missing here?

well i did mean to run autofs on the server, but i guess with the correct config you could mount an nfs located iso image locally rather than from the server... so mnay ways to achieve a single task.

not sure what problems you're having on the nfs side in your second part though...

Well I got thinking about. What sense does it make to have both the iso image and the iso image mounted through autofs on the same box. Basically each cd/dvd will use twice it's size on the hosting box. Or am I thinking about this wrong?

Here is the setup. hosting box has iso files shared via nfs as readonly. client box mounts the "iso share" then uses autofs to mount files from "iso share" on client box.

mounting an image doesn't affect disk space at all, no need to worry about that.