using destop CDROM with xterm

[Derek Baxter_1]

A fellow employee mentioned to me that a consultant once told him that if you have xterm installed on a desktop machine you could use the CD ROM drive from your desktop as though it were part of the server. The reason i ask is because we are going to be testing a install of oracle on a machine at another location. Any help provided will be greatly appreciated.

[Bill Hassell]

xterm has no connection with a CDROM drive. HP-UX has xterm, dtterm and hpterm installed by default. I'm not sure what is meant by using the CDROM from the desktop. Perhaps what was meant is the use of NFS to export the CDROM so it can be mounted and accessed remotely on a system that has no CDROM drive? xterm definitely is not required to accomplish this task.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Derek,

The exportfs & mount commands are what you'll need for this endeavor. I strongly recommend you check their man pages using..

man 1m mount
man exports
man exportfs

Typically the command on the exporting system to get it mounted locally will look like:

mount -F cdfs -o cdcase /dev/dsk/cXtYdZ /crom

Where X=controller instance, Y=SCSI ID & Z=LUN
something appearing like c1t1d0, but your mileage may differ.
But Oracle CDs are notorious for not following accepted standards & you may have to fall back to the onerous pfs standards which are complex & demanding & too detailed to get into here. But if you have a fully up-to-date patched system you may get by using the following:

mount -F cdsf -o rr /dev/dsk/cXtYdZ /cdrom

If you can see the proper dir structure for the CD in /cdrom, then you can export it to remote hosts. The procedure for doing so is as follows:

1) Edit /etc/exports and add the following line:

/cdrom -ro

2) Then export the filesystem

exportfs -a

3) IF the importing system is an HP system, them issue the appropriate mount command on it:

mount -F nfs -o ro export_host:/cdrom /cdrom

Then it should be available in /cdrom on the remote host and you can use it as though it was in that system's CD...albeit at a reduced performance rate because you'll be dealing with network lag & NFS overhead.

HTH,
Jeff