Path: cdrom.com!barrnet.net!decwrl!hookup!news.moneng.mei.com!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!gumby!yale!yale.edu!noc.near.net!news.delphi.com!BIX.com!mdulcey From: mdulcey@BIX.com (mdulcey on BIX) Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.networking,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom,comp.multimedia,alt.cd-rom Subject: Re: Does Novell 3.12 handle all of the CD-ROM networking problems Date: 3 Mar 94 22:41:31 GMT Organization: Delphi Internet Services Corporation Lines: 28 Message-ID: References: <2l51k2$4cq@hobbes.cc.uga.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bix.com Xref: cdrom.com comp.sys.novell:4987 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.networking:722 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom:1580 comp.multimedia:2340 alt.cd-rom:1274 >>I have heard that the new Novell 3.12 has the capability to handle CDs >>as hard disks, thus eliminating the need for these add-on products. I >>couldn't find any mention of 3.12 in the cdromlan.faq. >NW 3.12 comes with support for 1 CD. This support was installed >primarily to help load the os off cd I think. You are still going to >need something like SCSI Express. Wrong. NetWare 3.12 can support more than one drive. Nor is there any special restriction on what the mounted disks can contain. We have a server here with 2 NEC CDR-74 drives; one contains the Microsoft Developer's Network CD, and the other has the Novell Network Support Encyclopedia (that is, most of the time; we sometimes take one of these offline to mount something else). For all that, however, SCSI Express may still be worth a look, even though you have to pay extra for it. The Novell CD support requires a lot of hard disk space (about 5MB for each CD you mount, and it doesn't, by default, reuse the space for a new CD when you dismount the first one), and takes a long time to mount a CD (up to 5 minutes -- and it uses 100% of the CPU for the duration, seriously slowing down everyone else using that server). SCSI Express is better on both of these counts. BTW, the Novell CD-ROM support works fine with any SCSI host adapter that has a NetWare driver. Novell provides drivers for the Adaptec 1540/2, 1640, and 1740/2; for anything else, you need a driver from the host adapter manufacturer. It works with most models of SCSI CD-ROM drive. Novell does not provide any support for non-SCSI drives (Mitsumi, Panasonic, etc.).