[seul-edu] Turning a samba server into a cd jukebox

[Harish Pillay 9v1hp <harish@iqmind.com>]

Hi.  This is slightly off topic, but has relevance for schools.  I am 
trying to propose a solution to schools to manage their CDROMs and am
looking at deploying a Linux box with plenty of harddisk space and via 
samba offer the CDROMs to the local school network.  The problem I am
addressing is having to dish out say 20 CDROMs for a class and having 
to ensure that they are all returned at the end of the class and in
good condition and all the associated admin problems.  This solution, 
as proposed, uses the latest version of samba with the "max connection" 
option set, so that if the school has say 20 copies of a particular CD 
title, this "license" will be enforced via the max connection = 20 
directive set.  This helps to ensure the "licensing police" will be kept
happy.

I have done the following:

a) On a Linux box (with *lots* of disk space), I did the following:

box# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/var/cd1.iso   #got an image of the CD
box# mkdir /stuff/cd1                   #creating the mount point
box# mount /var/cd1.iso /stuff/cd1 -t iso9660 -o loop #mounting via the loop device

This is done for a few CDROMs, each mounted at /stuff/cdX where X=1...n
(which in my case is 4).

b) After these images are mounted, I get /stuff/cdX shared out via samba.

c) The client Windows machines are able to attach to it and be able to 
install the apps from that shared drive (albeit shared CD image).

d) Some of the apps work just fine.  Some, however, ask for the CDROM to
be in the physical CD drive.  This inspite of the app's INI file having
a drive letter assigned to it which corresponds to the samba drive.

e) From d), it appears that there is some winapi that is being called that
checks for the contents to be really from a CD and not from a networked
drive.

I am certain that there is some way to redirect this to the network drive
and get away with it.  I am wondering if anyone has done any coding on
windows drive/file IO and has any code to get e) going and willing to share
it with me?  I have done some checks on the net, but have found only
proprietary ones which have a server component that runs you know where.

I am not averse to closed-source options, but would really prefer open ones.

Thanks and regards.

Harish