8.1 on CD ROM

[Dodds@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Douglas Dodds)]

    Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1991 12:29 EDT
    From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)
	From: lawton@AIVAX.RADC.AF.MIL (James Lawton)

	With the great news of Genera 8.1 finally being actually released, and
	with all the talk of the distribution being available on CD ROM, I would
	very much like to know just who can use the CD ROM distrubution?  What
	kind of hardware configuration must one have?  How is the software read
	off the CD?

The Genera 8.1 CD-ROM is structured with two volumes, one a smallish
MacFS volume containing only the Macintosh software needed for the
release, and the other, with the bulk of the data, an ISO9660 volume.
Genera 8.1 has software to support accessing ISO9660 filesystems (and
there is provision to bootstrap 8.1 for all supported configurations).
And SunOS 4.1 supports ISO9660 too.

	For example, we have a cluster of 36xx machines, a Sun 3/260 with a
	UX1200S in it, and a Macintosh with a CD ROM drive (Well, the CD ROM
	drive isn't actually here yet, but it will be soon).  Note that there is
	no Ivory in the Mac, and there is no CD ROM drive on the Sun.  All of
	this equipment is connected via ethernet.

	So, can a configuration like this make use of the CD ROM distribution?
	If so, how?

    That doesn't sound like a workable configuration.  

Right, it's not, unfortunately.  At a minimum, you need to add either a
MacIvory to go with your Mac/CD-ROM or you need a Sun with a CD-ROM
drive (see below).  Of course, more elaborate additions work also, e.g.,
an XL plus CD-ROM drive.
						       I expect that Genera
    accesses the CD-ROM drive as if it were a tape drive, and I don't think
    the Macintosh implements servers for any of the remote tape access
    protocols that Genera knows (Symbolics RTAPE and Unix /etc/rmt).

Not true.  Genera accesses a local CD-ROM drive (XL or MacIvory) as a
SCSI disk.  It accesses a CD-ROM drive on a remote Genera (running 8.1)
via any appropriate file protocol.  And it accesses a CD-ROM drive on a
Sun (whether the Sun is hosting a UX or not) via NFS or TCP-FTP.

    The CD-ROM drive is just a SCSI device, so if you can buy a SCSI
    interface for the Sun you could then hook the CD-ROM drive to it when
    you need it.  Newer Sun models have SCSI interfaces built in, but
    Sun-3's don't.

The requirement is a little stronger than that.  To our knowledge, the
only Sun models for which Sun's CD-ROM driver is qualified are the 4/330
and the Sparcstation 1 (and 2?).  But you should check with your Sun rep
for an authritative list of the possibilities.