[NTLUG:Discuss] Multiple CD-R Burners / Observations & Questions

[David Simmons]

Guys,

For my company, I've created a CD that everyone wants me to reproduce
for them - in an effort to reduce creation time, I've added a second CD
burner to my Linux system.  Now the fun begins.  Here are my conclusions
on what seemed to work best...and request for what others are
using/doing and refinement of the CLI scripts.

System: Fedora Core 1, PIII @ 866 MHz, 256MB Ram, 20GB Hard-drive w/ the
following CD-R/W's:

ATAPI - CD-R/RW 48x16 (0,0,0) - As Secondary Master IDE channel (with no
slave)
HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8525B 52x32x52 (0,1,0) - On PCI ATA-133 Card as
Primary Master (with no slave)

**Note - both drives utilize ide-scsi with the following lines in my
/boot/grub/grub.conf kernel lines**:

kernel /vmlinuz-blah.blah ro hdc=ide-scsi hde=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/

**Note2 - Originally was burning a directory of files that included
multiple sub-directories.  When burning to multiple CD-R's, needed to
create a duplicate directory so that each burn had a different directory
of files to 'lock'.  Then I decided to 'compress' into .ISO's  Used two
different .ISO files to burn to different disks.  

Burning Methods:

Way 1) X-CD-Roast 0.98alpha14 w/ Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a19
(i686-redhat-linux-gnu)
Way 2) GnomeToaster 1.0Beta6 w/ Cdrecord (above)
Way 3) Fedora 'Built-In' burn:\\\
Way 4) Command-Line Script (cdrecord -v -speed=48 -dev=0,0,0 -data
-eject cd-1.iso)


         Performance Table
_____________________________________________________________
| Method     |  Observations & Notes                                  |
| CD1 | CD2
|                                                               |
_____________________________________________________________
|  2   |  2  |  Worked well to start with...would get errors  |
|       |     |  and 'child process died' errors after a few    |
_____________________________________________________________
|  2   |  3  |  Moved to this next...was more consistant (ie  |
|       |     |  less errors) but system would 'hang' until     |
|      |       |  the other burner was finished (guessed it was|
|       |     |  probing for other drive that was in use         |
_____________________________________________________________
|  4   |  4  |  Seemed to work fast...and consistant, but      |
|      |      |  hard to catch the 'had errors' message to      |
|       |     |  know that a 'coaster' was created and not to  |
|       |     |  put into 'good' stack.                                |
_____________________________________________________________
|  1   |  1  |  With their own .ISO file.  Seems to work the  |
|       |     |  best...because it would say if all tracks      |
|      |      |  were successfully written...and didn't seem   |
|       |     |  to have the 'hang' issue noted above...BUT    |
|       |    |   it filled my DMESG with 'attempt to access    |
|       |     |  beyond end of device' and 'timeout' issues    |
|       |     |  BUT these could have been from the other       |
|       |     |  methods as DMESG was only checked at end       |
|       |     |  and there were no timestamps in errors          |
_____________________________________________________________



Questions:

1).  What is everyone else doing with multiple CD-write drives for
concurrent burning?

2).  How can my CLI script be re-written for more reliable performance
and indication of a PASS! or FAIL! of the burning process.

3).  Noticing that cdrecord -scanbus shows many empty 'slots', it seems
like the theoretical limit would be 8 burners per machine - is anyone
doing this?  What are the 'gotchas' and work-arounds?

4).  Per Note2 above - it was necessary to create different directories
of files for 'locking'/permissions issues.  If I had 8 burners would I
need 8 different directories of files and/or 8 copies of the same .ISO?

Thanks for listening - Dave