Configuring K3B To Use A CD Writer on a Windows Box
 

My initial search of the web came up empty. I'm looking for information that might enable me to use K3B to use a shared CD writer installed on a Windows box. Is this possible?

Box 1: Windows, with an installed, operational, and shared CD writer. Can multi-boot into Slackware 10.1 and K3B works just fine there.
Box 2: Slackware 10.2 with K3B 0.12.4a and no CD drive.
Goal: to use the Windows shared CD writer located in Box 1 to create CDs from K3B in Box 2.

Through samba (smbclient), from Box 2 I easily read CDs inserted into the CD drive in box 1. The device sharing and networking are just fine. Thus, reading and sharing is not the issue. However, K3B seems designed to use only devices from /dev, and not from samba shares. Are there some tricks to make this work or is K3B limited to local devices?

Secondly, the smbmount command does not seem to support the iso9660, unhide, and noauto parameters. I would like to mount the CD drive when I manually mount all of my other Windows shares, but the lack of a noauto option seems to confuse samba if no CD is inserted. I do not use fstab to mount these shared drives, but I use a script to quickly mount when I need those shares. Any thoughts or solutions? (I haven't yet tried mount -t smbfs in fstab to see of the iso9660 and noauto options would function correctly.)

Thanks.

Ok, I'm not positive but I don't think that'll work.

AFAIK it is not possible. cdrecord which is the backend of k3b requires a physical device.

samba does not care what the filesystem type of the share is on the remote PC. With smbfs you can write to a NTFS as easily as a FAT32 share. You could use a UDF filesystem like InCD or DirectCD to write (in this case you do not need k3b) but there isn't any capability to use it as a removeable device. I do not see why the noauto option would not work but it has been some time since I've tried to do the same thing.

It might be possible to set up remote SCSI, but performance would suck.

Hi. This is related but not an answer to your question: ¿It is imperative to use K3B and burn under windows? Box1 has a CDRW and Slackware, ok, you can install and configure webCDwriter on it: http://joerghaeger.de/webCDwriter/ (it's a server for burning CD's you can access from any browser with java support). Or even better: move the cdrw to Box2 with slackware and webcdwriter, and Box1 with windows -plus any new box you'll have- will access a cdrw through your lan using any web browser with java. User guide is on the site in five languages. Hope it helps some way.

WebCDwriter sounds like a good idea and basically what I want to do. But personally, I always have avoided anything using Java. A personal quirk. Although I cautiously allow Java to be installed on my GNU/Linux partitions, Java is not touching my NT4 box. However, I do not always have Box 2 powered up---so even if I installed WebCDwriter and Java, I have to power up that box just to burn CDs. And if I have to do that I might as well burn CDs locally on that box.

With that link, I found a similar product called NeroNet. Spending money on this idea is not part of my goals, but at least I now know that my idea is feasible. K3B seems to be my stumbling block. Perhaps a feature request to the K3B maintainer is in order.

The CD drive is IDE, but some quick surfing shows that cdrtools supports remote SCSI (and the Linux kernel supports SCSI emulation). However, I primarily run my Windows box and that is where my CD drive sharing problem arises. Nothing in my Windows box is configured to share a CD writer. Thus, the idea of sharing the CD writer is doable, but not if Windows is the CD writer server.

In all, this is hardly a priority. I could someday move the CD writer to Box 2.

If only I could link a /dev driver to the samba share---. :) Of course, a samba share is not a device driver but just a directory portal.

Woodsman, with the WebCDWriter, you could just browse from the local machine? No reason to power on a second machine.

I say you go that route.

-- Shade

I already read CDs from within Windows. I use the CD drive as a writer by rebooting into Slackware (this is a multi-boot box). Thus, not having CD writing software in Windows has never been an issue for me.

On Box 2 I can browse the CD drive through samba, which was already configured to access my other Windows shares. Of course, I only can browse the CDs.

What I wanted to do, because the CD writer is installed in Box 1, which is my Windows box, and because I work primarily in Windows, was to share the drive as a writer with the second box. The discussion in this thread helped me realize that this is a Windows sharing problem, not a K3B problem.

This is not a significant problem because I burn only a few data disks per month. Rebooting into Slack on Box 1 is no encumbrance. I was only hoping I could add some flexibility with the CD writer much like sharing a printer. :)