Summary of Steps
Create a large partition to hold the CD Image Files.
Copy the CD to an image file using the dd command.
Mount the CD image file within the directory tree.
Share the directory on the network using Samba,
NFS, etc.
Also, make sure you've read Section 1 and
Section 1.2.
Choose (or create) a file system with the largest available disk
space on it. Keep in mind that CD-ROM's can hold around 640MB of data,
so if you want to share 8 full CD's on your network,
you'll need 5.1GB of space available.
Login as root or "su" to root.
bash# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 1.4G 82M 1.3G 6% /
/dev/hda1 15M 827k 14M 6% /boot
/dev/hda7 2.4G 1008M 1.3G 43% /usr
/dev/hda8 23.6G 11.7G 11.7G 50% /home
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Here the /home filesystem has the most available space,
so it is the most suitable filesystem to use for dumping the CD images to.
bash# cd /home
bash# mkdir image
bash# cd image
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Now, copy the CD to an ISO image. You must know the device name
of your CD-ROM drive (usually /dev/cdrom,
it could be /dev/scd0 for
SCSI CD-ROM's) I'll use the Mandrake distribution CD-ROM as an Example:
bash# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=mndrk81.iso
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- Note
The "if=" is the input file, the "of=" is the output file. You
should see a message stating the number of records in and number of
records out.
If you see i/o errors, they will most likely be due to
the lead-in and lead-out runoutblocks on the CD. If the number
of records in and number of records out do not match you may have a problem,
otherwise the image will most
likely be alright, but you can never know if the errors happened while
reading the ISO part of the CD or not (due to dust or scratches on the
CD).
Other utilities to read CD's exist, like readcd or
sdd.
More information about making 1:1 copies of CD's
exists in the [CD-Writing-HOWTO], see Section 1.3.
My thanks to Giblhauser Carl Michael for the runoutblock information.
The next step is to mount the ISO image file. Let's create
a directory under /mnt to place the mounted file.
bash# cd /mnt
bash# mkdir iso
bash# cd iso
bash# mkdir mndrk81
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Now mount the ISO image file to this newly created directory
bash# mount -o loop,unhide -t iso9660 -r /home/image/mndrk81.iso /mnt/iso/mndrk81
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- Note
The "-o loop" means use the option that mounts a file as a block
device. The unhide option shows hidden files. The "-t iso9660" means
that the file is in the iso9660 CD-ROM format. The "-r" means to mount read-only.
Thanks to Amar Chaouche for pointing out the unhide option for the mount command.
Now you can:
bash# cd mndrk81
bash# ls -al
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You should see a listing (ls) of the files and directories that are on
the actual CD (only now they're inside the ISO image file, and that's what you're
currently looking at!)
Now that we've manually mounted the image, and made sure it works,
an entry needs to made in the /etc/fstab file so that the image is
remounted on the next system startup. It's important to make the
entry AFTER the entry for the parent filesystem, e.g.
/home (I use vim,
but emacs, joe, pico
or jed will work just as well):
After the line that looks like the following (or whichever filesystem you've placed your images):
/dev/hda8 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
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Insert the following line with your text editor:
/home/image/mndrk81.iso /mnt/iso/mndrk81 iso9660 ro,loop,auto,unhide 0 0
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You'll need to have Samba installed and working to perform the next
steps (that's outside the scope of this instruction, see Section 1.3). If it's not
yet installed, consult your Linux distribution's instructions for
installing the Samba package. Or you can visit the Samba website
at http://us1.samba.org/samba/samba.html
for installation instructions,
binaries, and/or the source code.
To share your mounted CD's on a windows network, simply create
a stanza in the /etc/smb.conf file similar to the following:
[cdimages]
comment = All Shared CD Images
path = /mnt/iso
public = yes
writable = no
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This will share all the subdirectories under the
/mnt/iso directory
on the network. To mount the share to a local drive (in this case
the I: drive), bring up an MS-DOS Prompt on the Windows machine and
type the following:
C:\> net use I: \\yourlinuxmachine\cdimages
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Each CD image will now appear as a subdirectory on the I: drive of
your Windows machine.
To mount ONLY the Mandrake CD image to a drive letter (we'll use M:,
the root drive of which, will correspond exactly to the CD as if it
was just inserted in the CD-ROM drive), create the following stanza
in the /etc/smb.conf file.
[mndrk81]
comment = Mandrake Linux 8.1
path = /mnt/iso/mndrk81
public = yes
writable = no
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Then, at your MS-DOS Prompt, mount it with the following command:
C:\> net use m: \\yourlinuxmachine\mndrk81
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- Warning
The Samba smb.conf file stanzas presented here are
simplified, and not secure. Many more options exist for
a Samba share which limit who can mount the shares, control how
user authentication is performed, and whether the share is even
browseable through Network Neighborhood on the Windows machines.
Make sure that NFS is running and configured correctly on
your Linux machine, then add the following to the /etc/exports
file using your own preferred options:
# sample /etc/exports file
/mnt/iso (ro,insecure,nohide,all_squash)
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- Note
The nohide option will allow you to mount a parent directory, without
explicitly mounting all exported subdirectories beneath it.
Now try running:
This should re-export everything in your /etc/exports file.
Now, when typing "showmount -e yourlinuxmachine"
you should see that the /mnt/iso directory is included in the exports list.
