[tech] Burner vs. Diablo 2 (Re: [ucc] AGM Minutes)

[Nick Bannon]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 08:29:04PM +0800, David Manchester wrote:
> <blurt>
> Try this: http://www.sonicwall.com/download/Other_products.html
> </blurt>

Cool, sounds fixable, then.

[...]
> > Don't quite understand, surely you mostly only want the iso9660 and 
> > your native filesystem? About the only thing I'd want to read in 
> > from local media is old Amiga floppy disks, and Linux on x86 can't 
> > read those!
> 
> Me neither. I only burn ISO9660 CDs Nick ....

Just to be clear - I'm all in favour of sticking the burner on a decent
workstation that's not going to keep getting rebooted into a single
user OS.

However, Linux (tsk) on PC hardware (tsk) does have some advantages and
if we just go and plug the burner straight into mola, we're going to
have a crap solution and someone's just going end up plugging it back
into a useful machine or doing without.

It needs:
 * Fast ethernet
 * At least a couple of gigs of spare disc to play in

(If it had additional temporary space > morwong's largest partition
 (a mere 9GB) I hereby promise to write some backup scripts using it.
 Attaching [SAF]'s DLT to it on occasion would be even better.)

Linux also has advantages that it shares to a greater or lesser extent
with other *nix'es - notably doing flexible things with filesystems.
Sure it'll read Amiga disc images (though for actual floppies you'll
need Amiga floppy hardware as well, but of course you knew that). I've
found it very handy to be able to mount a 40GB ReiserFS partition on an
IDE disc in a hard disc cradle and burn ready-made images straight off
it.  I've found it handy to be able to process and loopback mount large
(eg 6GB and 20GB) disc images. It can make use of Joliet CDs. Given a
decent network, though, none of that should be vital.

[...]
> What's CD-RW got to do with it? a CD-R blank is like $0.75 ...

True, but not from the UCC vending machine. Still grates a bit to throw
one away every month, when a CD-RW is now $1. Anyway, as Grahame said,
at the time we got the drive that we had a sensible quote for.

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal