On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Greg Earle wrote:

> We often use "mkisofs" as Peter mentioned to create the HSFS images.  We also
> use another software package from our CD-WO vendor

MKISOFS works for us.

> To actually *write* the CD-WO discs, we would never trust the host processor.
> So we use a product called CD Studio from Young Minds, Inc. for this part.
> Basically, it's a dedicated PC that has a built-in 4x CD-WO drive (used to be
> an outboard Kodak 2x writer attached on a separate SCSI bus to the PC, but hey
> the technology's gotten better and smaller).  It presents itself as a tape
> drive interface to the host via the SCSI bus.  So we attach these things to a
> few SunOS 4.1.3 machines, and then we just use "dd" to write 32k fixed-size
> blocks to this pseudo tape dev: "dd if=mkisofsimagefile of=/dev/rst0 obs=32k".
> That gets the data onto a 1 Gb hard drive inside the PC.  To make it actually
> do the write, you merely issue an "mt -f /dev/rst0 fsf" which seems "odd" but
> I guess it's the closest paradigm they could come up with.  Since the PC is
> doing nothing but running this writer software, it can thus write to the CD-WO
> at fixed speed.  Works like a champ.  Unfortunately, the setup (PC and CD-WO
> and software) is a bit pricey.  But it's vital for a production environment
> like ours where people are pressing CD-WO's all the time.  (We also use
> things like 900 CD jukeboxes and the like ... )
> 
> Anyway, the bottom line is, use "mkisofs" under NetBSD to generate your HSFS
> images, but I'd never trust trying to write the image out to a writer directly
> under NetBSD (or VMS, or ... ).  The dedicated PC scheme works for us and it
> guarantees constant head velocity during the writes so there's no glitches.

The Young Minds stuff was too expensive for us.

We use one of two things:

*	Dedicated PC - preferably running only DOS and certainly not
	running TSRs like screen savers that kick in and pinch the
	CPU for time slices while a CD write is running.  However,
	a Pentium running windows and an Adaptec 2940 works quite
	well.  The software WinCD To Go.  Been used in anger by
	ourselves and others for several thousand CDs at least.

*	Sparc 10 or 20 running ( wash my mouth out here ) Solaris 2.5.
	The software 'cdrecord' by Joerg Schilling but it has to run
	as a RT ( pseudo Real Time ) process - priocntl.  Been only
	used in anger over the last month and then for only 10+ CDs.
	As NetBSD does not have something similar, we may be stuck
	here.

- Damian.

Damian McGuckin			Pacific Engineering Systems International
damianm@esi.com.au		Ph:+61-2-99063377 ... Fx:+61-2-99063468
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