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

[Chris Cox]

David Simmons wrote:
> 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
...snip...
> Questions:
> 
> 1).  What is everyone else doing with multiple CD-write drives for
> concurrent burning?

I just use cdrecord and run multiple instances all using the SAME
.iso image.

Ideally, I would have like speed CDR/CDRW drives and try to start
them all at once if possible.  This is just to make the disk
caching work for you.

I only have two devices and both are master and alone on their
respective IDE buses.

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

I you have burnfree (burnproof) enabled and your devices support it,
should not have any problems.

> 
> 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?

Depends on how many valid controllers can be setup.  Not sure about
ide-scsi issues in that regard.  Just getting 8 master IDE channels
would be difficult.  I support 4 with master/slave might be ok... again...
you'll likely have burnfree enabled.

You might also want to experiment with dev=ATAPI -scanbus and see
how things look.  You can then do things like dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 for your
device using the libscg library.  Not saying this gets around the
issue, but it did show my devices to be on different "scisbus".  So
I could see two IDE busses each supporting 8 drives (weird if not
impossible).

> 
> 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?

Locking? Permissions?  Shoot... just use cdrecord.