> 1. Main software: Cdrecord available from
> <ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/>.
> This application is advertised as unsophisticated,
> and you need to check the list of compatible drives
> maintained at this ftp site to make sure your CD-r
> is supported. Ancillary information and component
> software needed is listed below.
>
It works very well on Solaris/Sparc, and I have used it for several years.
It is under continuing development, and has many features. I did have some
trouble using it on a FreeBSD/Intel machine, at least after I upgraded the
OS the last time. I moved the CD-R back to a Sun machine and it goes fine.
I have used a Yamaha CDR-102 (4x read, 2x record).
> 2. Want the file SCHILYfbk.sparc.tar.Z which
> is in pkgadd format to simulate a block device
> {see <ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/unix/kernel/fbk/>
> for this program}.
This is a special driver to allow mounting of the iso image created by
mkisofs. It is completely unnecessary, and I'm a little uncertain what is
would be used for.
> 3. Also want the formatting utility sformat-3.3.tar.gz
> to properly format the disk. The article says that
> along with the formatting utility, one needs a scsi
> driver like the sdg driver from Sun. The URL:
> <ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/kernel/scg/> is
> listed at this point.
sformat has nothing to do with CD-R at all; Joerg Schilling's version of
disk formatting utility, supposedly does more things that Sun's format, but
I've never tried it.
The scg driver IS needed, as that provides the means for sending commands to
the scsi CD-R device without going through the Sun disk drivers.
There is one other component of interest, which is a replacement for the
scsi driver, sd; this you need if you want to mount CD-ROMs using drives
with sector size != 512 (2048 is the more normal setting). It must be
carefully matched to the OS version, and is not needed if you only use the
CD-R for writing CDs.
> 4. The next item listed is mkisofs which is listed as
> beint at
> <ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/Linux/misc/cd/mkisofs-1.11.tar.gz>
Essential, this creates the iso image that gets written to disk. Joerg
keeps a copy of it along with patches at his site, but it is software
developed elsewhere.
> 5. Note that the cdrecord distribution contains
> a general scsi user transport library.
> 6. E-mail for the author of all this software is
> joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de
> Now, I haven't tried any of this and cannot comment
> on how well it works. I would be interested in hearing
> how well it works myself.
I've found it very reliable, at least on Solaris. When I started with CD-R
it was after several failures with 3.5" OD drives (we abandoned DAT long ago
for archiving), and it has not failed us yet. We save all old data
centrally, and users no longer need to worry about it. The five most recent
CDs are on-line, and if data is on an earlier one, users can request for it
to be loaded. The software does not have the elegant interface that I
assume some of the commercial products have, but those commercial products
usually cost more than the CD-R drive itself, so I can learn to type in a
long command line. I believe there is a graphical interface to mkisofs and
cdrecord, but it may only be for Linux; I have never looked into it.
Hope this helps.
-- Steve Philson philson@nmr.chem.umn.edu Director NMR Lab 612-626-0297 Chemistry Dept. University of Minnesota