CD Writers

[ALAN BELLENGER]

Is it possible to connect a Cd Writer to an HP N Class server running HP-UX 11.00 and if so what is the best one available.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

You can connect one but it will only read. There is not software to write to a CDROM burner. This isn't a trivial piece of software as there are many, many standards and many media types and special technologies (like buffer underrun protection) that all require detailed knowledge of the drive's firmware.

The Yamaha and Plexstor SCSI drives seem to be very mainstream and are supported by the free software called cdrecord and mkisofs which are bundled together as CDtools. Look here:

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html

This seems to work OK on A,L and N class systems. Support is of course, from the CDrecord web page.

Note that if you have a software support contract, you should have some CD recording software on the latest (June 2002) CDs. However, this is only suported for workstations, not the N class server.

[RadioShack RSTS(Backup)]

I'm currently using an 'HP CD-Writer+ 9200' on an HP-UX 11.0 system with the cdrecord product without problems.

I wish that HP would include this technology into the OS so that it could be better supported. My use currently includes creating 'Ignite Golden Image' disks for internal and Disaster recovery purposes. I also cut CD's that contain static data that we might need in a Disaster situation.

If HP would support writting to the CD-RW similar to other hard-drive's (ie: HFS filesystem), there are many other options that would open their doors.

If it was difficult then M$-windo$ couldn't handle it. (personal opinion

[Wodisch]

Hi,

AFAIK Young Minds, Inc is selling osftware and hardware to burn CD-ROMs on HP-UX for many years, already...
They have even written the (in)famous "Portable File System" stuffe (pfs_mountd, pfsd, pfs_mount, pfs_umount) which only very recently became obseleted due to that new patch, which allows HP-UX's "mount" command to mount High-Sierra/ISO9660/RockRidge CD-ROMs.

Simply read the "man" page about e.g. "pfsd"...

Regards,
Wodisch