Subject: Re: CD Writer Software
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Carsten Hammer <chammer@hermes.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de>
List: current-users
Date: 04/20/1996 14:28:18
> 
> 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.

We use the software named "gear" to make and write CDs on a Dec Alpha with
a 4x Speed CDwriter (Yamaha). We never had any problems with writing
even when we had constantly loadfactors of 6 or more.
We always write with 4x Speed. The OSF machine has an extra scsi-hostadapter
for the CDwrite, thats it.
The software allows to use so called virtual images that safe space by only having
references to the files in an image to be written. When using this option there
can  be problems when having many short files and many directories inside directories.
As the pysical image is build on the fly then by accessing the referenced files
it is not always possible to use this modus with high loads and many short files.

ciao
Carsten

PS: iam no "gear" advocate. This software has many nasty bugs and is a real pain
because it always reminds you that it is a port of a msdos software. I just
wanted to say a CD writing software can work very well in a unix environment.
(i think the dec is an old 3000 model with turbochannel and a 150Mhz alpha chip,
i can find out it if anybody cares about correct dates)

> 
> 	- Greg
> 
>