Mounting .ISO's Into An NT File System? 63
haplo21112 asks: "We all know how to mount an ISO image into the Linux file system:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.iso /mnt/isoimage.
Unfortunately the rather large software distribution server I am stuck with here at work is 2000 based, but we would love to replicate this functionality somehow on the NT System. I have done many Google searches to find a way of doing this and come up empty. There seem to many utilities that will mount the .ISO as a 'virtual' CD rom drive, but this doesn't really solve the problem since we are talking about mounting something on the order of 200 .ISO images this way.
I am looking to replicate the Linux functionality, create a directory, and mount the ISOs as subdirectories."
SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:1, Informative)
At least your Windows boxen would see them, no?
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:1)
It shows up just like the CD would, or any other network drive for that matter. It worked for me. I would recommend this route!
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:2)
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:2)
Two one hundred gig ATA/100 ide drives (yeah, SCSI would be better) would run about US$450... A box to put them in, say $500. Under $1000 plus the time to install and config Linux and Samba. Let's be pessimists and say its $5000 all added up.
I bet you guys wasted more than that already looking for a Windows solution.
Methinks you work for morons. I know, I used to.
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:1)
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:2)
However...
Realize that you still have the Linux support problems which likely make you fear it in the first place, plus the need to support vmware as well.
You clearly are operating under a policy where you can't get the help you need and don't have confidence in your own skills in the area to be self-sufficient. Neither of these is meant as a disparaging comment on it's own (no one knows everything, after all), but it does mean that your support policies are insufficient to meet your real-world needs. Ignoring these real world needs as "real", in favour of simplifying your data center's support requirements strikes me as rather stupid, or at least nearsighted, though I don't know on who's part.
Really, loopback-mounting the .iso images on a Linux box that serves up SMB shares, using Samba, is probably the easiest way to get this done -- you're not running a changing or complex environment on the Linux box, you're simply serving files, so stability should not be a major problem. You're also in luck, as many, many others have "snuck" Samba on Linux into operational environments when faced with problems such as yours, generally with a positive experience.
So, I stand by my suggestion: install a minimal Linux distribution, with Samba (Red Hat should do fine). Duplicate over another machine if you worry about hardware failures. Experience suggests that this really does result in the lowest TCO -- this isn't bleeding edge Linux stuff.
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:2)
Using Samba, and mounting the images with the loopback filesystem, is really the only sensible way to do this. It's quick, it's cheap, and it *works*. Leave politics out of it. This is a job that *nix (Linux, BSD etc) excels at. Windows is great on the desktop, but it's just not capable of handling this.
Think about it - if you needed a hole dug, you'd use a spade. If you needed a big hole dug, you'd use a JCB. No amount of politicking is going to make the spade dig a big hole as fast as a JCB.
Re:SMB shares under Linux on a separate box? (Score:1)
Even more amazing... my CD Juke Box didn't even have a CD-ROM drive
Suggestion: 'subst' (Score:1)
(Disk Management lets you do this too.)
You'd have to get fancy to get past 26 drive letters though, maybe a batch file to switch in the
C:\>subst
Associates a path with a drive letter.
SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1:
drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
[drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
a virtual drive.
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.
An explanation (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, disc 1 would be a file such as c:\images\disc1.iso and be mounted as c:\library\disc1\ ; disc 2 would be c:\images\disc2.iso mounted as c:\library\disc2\ and so on. Basically, the single *.iso file is an entire file system (read: disc) squashed into a file and sitting on another file system.
By way of explanation, file system images are individual files representing a disk partition. They are as if you were to take the data off of a disk bit by bit, in sequence, with all partition information, file tables, etc., and put it into a file. This image can be ISO, FAT, NTFS, VFAT, FAT32, EXT2, EXT3, whatever format you can think of. You can have a FAT32 filesystem residing within an NTFS filesystem. With a proper operating system, you can mount this "virtual filesystem in a file" as a filesystem. In UNIX type OS's, there are no drive letters, but the filesystem can be mounted to a directory. In Microsoft-type OS's, every filesystem is mounted as a drive letter rather than a directory, which inherently limits you to a maximum of 26 simultaneously mounted "drives." The UNIX limitation is much higher.
In the days of DOS, it was found that some programs work best if their folders were in the root directory of some drive. Unfortunately, this made for a very cluttered root directory. A workaround was implemented: SUBST allows you to mount a directory as a virtual drive letter, letting the program have it's own root directory, while allowing the user to "sort out" his hard drive by having directories for programs, etc.
DOS and Windows have never had native support for mounting partitions as directories; this support IS available (finally) under Windows XP. Mounting image files as folders is uniquely UNIX-like; I don't know if XP supports this or not.
Re:An explanation (Score:3, Informative)
Peace,
(jfb)
Re:An explanation (Score:2)
An aside (Score:1, Redundant)
Besides, who on earth would want more than 26 block devices? [Uh, maybe the same folks who would want more than 640k of RAM? Naaah.]
So now, as then, if you want something out of the ordinary (i.e., something useful) don't use Micro$soft products. I think the suggestion [slashdot.org] of using Samba [samba.org] on Linux [linux.org] under VMWare [vmware.com] to serve the ISO images to the host W2K box is your best bet.
Norton Virtual CD + Drive Mapping in Win2k (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Norton Virtual CD + Drive Mapping in Win2k (Score:1)
Why not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:1, Insightful)
That almost seems like a backward way to do it, unless you were anticipating installing these ISOs on a Linux system.
Re:Why not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:1)
download an ISO
and you want to install via FTP and the only box you have available is nt
been there, done that
Re:Why not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:2)
Re:Why not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:1)
So he wants to be able to access the contents of the ISO without the waste of time and disk space of extracting it.
Re:Why not copy contents of CDs to directories? (Score:2)
daemon toolz (Score:1)
i tried the new one last week with freebsd 4.4 iso's and it failed though
Re:daemon toolz (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually I could use something like this as well, since the infamous Microtest/xStore machine [slashdot.org] still doesn't work right - never did get any of the code from them - and the school netadmin isn't going to have a clue how to work the samba-sharing-loop-mounts linux server after my contract runs out.
Windows 2000 directory restructuring (Score:3, Informative)
SUBST, JOIN, and the like tools from old-school MS DOS let you map directories to drive letters and vice versa.
Windows 2000 also includes a copy of what is, pretty much, Vetrias Voulme Manager, used for making software RAID arrays (called "Dynamic drives") and such. Maybe you could use it (It's found in Administrative Tools>Computer Managment) to do something of that nature. There's a LOT of options about removable media, media pools, and volume management there.
Also check in the MSKB. It's actually helpful if you know what you're looking for.
Re:Windows 2000 directory restructuring (Score:3, Informative)
The MSKB and technet got a good three over, by myself and 4 other people in my group....MS simply does not support this....
Virtual CD (Score:2, Interesting)
2-10-2000 18:25 24,064 VCdControlTool.exe
2-10-2000 18:05 11,296 VCdRom.sys
I can't remember how I got it though - possibly the Windows XP beta program.
Re:Virtual CD (Score:1)
Re:Virtual CD (Score:2)
Re:Virtual CD (Score:1)
Re:Virtual CD (Score:1)
Re:Virtual CD (Score:2)
windows isn't quite as bad when its free
Why ISOs (Score:1)
700MB * 200 ISOs = 140GB
140GB / 1 Gb/sec = 19 min.
Re:Why ISOs (Score:1)
((140GB*8)/.6)/1Gbps/60=31.1 minutes
Nero - by Ahead software has this capability (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nero.com/en/function.htm [nero.com]
Has a SCSI/Image interpreter that mounts
Re:Nero - by Ahead software has this capability (Score:1)
Re:Nero - by Ahead software has this capability (Score:1)
\\server01\d$
\\server01\e$
..
..
\\server10\z$
at least you'd have them all accessable at once. Requires a few servers, though (but minimal resources on those servers)
Just a thought...
Re:Nero - by Ahead software has this capability (Score:1)
Use the Win2k DFS (Distributed File System) - mount the drive then unassign the drive letter. Then mount each raw drive as a distinct folder in the DFS tree. Requires a native Win2k domain, though.
A simpler approach would be to bypass DFS and go with the standard "map this drive to a subfolder of drive
build an ISO server (Score:4, Informative)
The server will be based on Linux, and have plenty of disk space to hold the large number of ISO files. I'd write a script that would read a directory listing and mount all ISO files via the
From there, the ISO mount points are going to be accessible via an SMB (Samba) share.
This will allow users on the network to use their "Network Neighborhood" or "Computers Near Me" interfaces to browse the files. In fact, most users will probably never know about the ISO files, nor will they know that they're browsing a linux machine. Its going to be ultra transparent.
Links (Score:5, Informative)
How to Create and Manipulate NTFS Junction Points (Q205524)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
How Single Instance Storage Identifies Which Volumes to Manage (Q226545)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (Q175761)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
(Be sure to remove spaces in the URLs. The slashcode on slashdot has a bug that inserts spaces in long words.)
I think that Windows 2000/XP may not support filesystems that are not seen as physical volumes (partitions) or logical volumes on a dynamic partition. I have not been able to find anything that indicates file-based filesystem images are supported.
It has a bug though (Score:1)
<a href=this.could.be.really.really.long>blah</ a>
err, maybe not plaintext, but "Code"
Run Linux in VMWare (Score:1)
or use VirtualPC for Windows (Score:1)
I like the sound of using a cygwin-based solution even better but if it's possible, I don't know how to do it.
Money talks (Score:2)
There may be a third-party utility which allows this. I don't know what it is.
Your best bet may be (impossible, but who knows...) to convince the powers-that-be that the only way to implement this is using *nix/Samba and that the Total Cost of Ownership will be less than the TCO of the current implementation.
If the TCO is more than what you're doing now, consider the proposal toilet paper.
Remember that TCO includes not only the cost of implementation, but productivity issues as well. If productivity is sufficiently increased, then TCO will be lower than it currently is.
You mentioned that the datacenter only supports Windows 2000. In my opinion, that is short-sighted, but that is a topic for another flameb^H^H^H^H^H^H story.
3rd party utility (Score:3, Informative)
Two Products (Score:5, Informative)
1. DAEMON Tools (currently v2.88) [daemon-tools.com]
2. FarStone Tech's Virtual Drive (currently v6.2) [farstone.com]
My recommendation is DAEMON Tools. It is a quick and dirty freeware solution which has proven rock solid on my systems. It mounts ISO and a variety of other CD image file types as lettered drives. It's really built for use on a workstation but once the drives are mounted they can be shared like any other normal drive. (Tools to create CD images are not included.)
Virtual Drive (Network Edition) is commercial software and comes in a variety of languages. It has a prettier interface and includes CD management tools (ISO creation). Personally it didn't impress me but YMMV.
Daemon (Score:1)
Re:Daemon (Score:2)
How about using partitions...or even DFS... (Score:3, Informative)
First, a functionality exists in win2k through which to mount drive partitions as folders... Unlike the idea of using subst & such, this is not constricted by the magic number of 26 drive letters. Simply identify/create the partitions (logical, extended, dynamic, physical drives whatever...) and edit the properties to have them mounted as folers. The ISO's could then be stored in partitions/drives mounted as folders with appropriate names. More can be gleamed on this topic by reading this Microsoft article [microsoft.com] at Technet [microsoft.com].
A second alternative, that while being more complicated may provide for greater flexibility would be to implement DFS (Distributed File System). Through this package you can map ANY drive/partition on any workstation to appear as a shared folder on a server. As the name suggests, this would allow for a more distributed strategy that would allow you to leverage several machines in distributing your ISO's. More can be read on DFS at this site [microsoft.com]...
I hope this information proves to be useful for you and that I am not misunderstanding you intentions!!! As many others have pointed out, Linux would far and away be a better, more compact solution; however, like you I am saddled with the responsiblity of working at a Microsoft centric company...and for the record - IT SUCKS!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Hey Good windows utility for browsing ISO right V (Score:1)
loopback devices under linux... (Score:1)
Granted its a quick recompile, but it sure wrecks uptime...
Why are we being asked to enhance M$ NT's value? (Score:2)
Timothy, are you being asked by your employers to include more NT issues, or are you looking to bail out of
The question posed does not help Linux penetrate a technical market niche; it helps give NT a functionality that Linux already has.
If you are running out of good "Ask Slashdot" submissions, please let us know. I could probably fire off 10 good ones if I knew the effort I expended would be worthwhile.