I have here a NEC 7-disk CD-ROM changer (SCSI, multi-LUN). Everything
works fine now (after tampering with timeouts in the AHA1542 driver).
However, as I am an ISP, I have a lot of users on the machine. And
I came to a HUGE problem. When one user accessed the CDs, everything
was fine, but when two people tried to read different CDs at the same
time, the situation was awful :( - as each access read data in 4KB
blocks, the CDs keeped changing - both users' tasks as to say, hung.
I had to deny the users the direct access to the CDs.
I wrote a daemon with some utils to queue up (and cache) the accesses
to the CDs a la: user issues command
cpfromcd 3:/somedir/somefile .
, the command puts the request into a queue and the daemon satisfies
the requests.
However, this is not quite comfortable to the users. Could this be
done in the kernel (or somehow else in the userland) so that users
could browse the CDs in the usual way?
*********************************
Magnus Hiie
Eesti Ekspress
E-mail: mgn@ekspress.ee
Tel: +372 6408046
GSM: +372 56 51146