I am sorry I did not speak up about the use of CD ROMs on Novell
networks. I actually have experience in this area and have fought past
the bugs which crop up along the way. I have just started at Notre Dame,
and the move, settling in, and getting going here has been time consuming.
fun and exciting, yes, but time consuming.
I developed a CD ROM enterprise at Cleveland State University (CSU). I
selected Discports. Discports are a videocassette-sized contraption with
one end having an ethernet or 10-Base-T connection, and the other a SCSI
25-pin connector. You plug one end into its own netowrk connection and
the other will plug into seven CD ROM players, which may be a SCSI tower
or individual SCSI devices.
The Novell file server may support up to nine (9) of these discports at
the current time, for a total of sixty-three CDs being accessible from a
Novell server as individual volumes. Note the limits on volumes in
NetWare 3.11 before you set up your administrative drive mappings, etc.
You may usually do it on the fly, and some CDs have their own internal
tracking.
Setup and configuration of the Discports uses MS Windows software known as
"discview." There is a DOS version but it is super complex, and it took
me a few weeks to get the hang of it. Despite my aversion to Windoze, I
use it anyway, and it provides a friendly graphical look at how to mount
the CD devices, which volumes to claim, security (as in who may access
it). Not the security part, you do NOT use SYSCON to provide access to
the CDs loaded as volumes.
Why did I select Discport over SCSI Express? I did not want the CDs to be
mounted on the file server. Discports may be changed on the fly, like a
hot-swap. This is a valuable tool, and should not be underestimated!
Each CD you mount requires 1.2 MB RAM on the file server. If you do not
have the RAM your server WILL crash!!! I calculated that I would need
almost 92 MB RAM on a server running what I was running (email and full
tcp/ip capabilities including bootp, resolvd, finger, ping, and ftpd).
You can multiply 63 x 1.2 and come up with answers yourself.
The one problem you will have to look out for is having short cables. We
ordered six inch cables because there is a limitation in the length of a
SCSI chain! If you have too long a chain you drop off devices, usually
starting with the FIRST one mounted, usually SCSI 0.
After that make sure you have proper termination on your CD ROM
players. for single devices the Toshiba 3401 something or other is
perfect and works well (do not forget the something or other in your
order :-)).
As for the 6 requirements:
> Now, what advice can I give:
>
> 1. Get the best equipment you possibly can.
> 2. Don't get rid of ANY print sources until you are absolutely sure
> everything is running fine. (Give it a year or more!)
> 3. Make sure all software and hardware is compatible (Sounds silly but
> you'd be surprised.)
> 4. Make sure your Systems Admin. (or equivalent position) is familiar
> with ALL requirements.
> 5. Have mgmt. behind you on getting everyone trained.
> 6. Keep a large jar of asprin handy for you and your Systems Admin! :)
this is pretty much true. I never took aspirin, though, nor drank, nor
swore, or any of that. I just tried to educate myself as much as I could
and follow through with what I had learned. I did not feel we needed a
year. I banged on things for a few weeks, and asked for others to test
also, then I irioned out bugs and felt confident things would work out.
One thing I want to agree with as much as one may agree with anything is
the training part. The more people who know the software the better. I
did not even work reference anymore, you see, and I tended to look at
things as holistically as I could but the public services staff needs to
be ready to field usage questions from patrons.
My next field of study is mounting CDs on Unix boxes, using NFS and a
similar capability known as AFS. AFS needs to write to the CD, so that is
out until an upgrade is prepared (it is underway now, though) and
released, but I hope to have off-campus users (insofar as licenses permit
this) and use the internet for CD playing.
Basically I love networking CDs. I do not like standalone stations. It
seems anachronistic and counter-productive. I live the networking
philosphy and wish to extend it as far as possible for the maximum benefit
of the most we can reach.
Go Discport! :-)
Thanks,
Joe
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Joe Rosenfeld 219-631-3939 Joseph.S.Rosenfeld.1@nd.edu
Director of Law School Computing, University of Notre Dame Law School
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