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31

answers:

1

I am designing a remote CD/DVD burner to address hardware constraints on my machine.

My design works like this: (analogous to a network printer)

  1. Unix-based machine (acts as server) hosts a burner.
  2. Windows-based machine acts as client.
  3. Client prepares data to burn and transfers it to the server.
  4. Server burns the data on CD/DVD.

My question is: what is the best protocol to transfer data over the network (Keeping the same directory hierarchy) between different operating systems?

+3  A: 

I would think some kind of archive format would be best. The *nix .tar archive format works well for most things. However, since you are burning CD/DVD disks the native .iso format of the disk may be a good choice.

You'll likely need to transfer the entire archive prior to burning to prevent buffer under-run issues.

Edit: You can use mkisofs to create the .iso file from a folder or your CD burner software may be able to output an .iso file.

Chris Nava
Write a couple of shell scripts, one in a Cygwin BASH on the Windows box, the other on the Linux server. Have the Windows machine SCP a .iso over to the Linux machine, then SSH launch the burn script at the other end. Or, you could use the Windows Script Host to do this with some scripting language (Python might be a good choice), and install that as an explorer extension so you can right-click a .iso and burn it.
Andrew McGregor