[Lancaster] Re: the kitchen network.

[Andy Baxter]

On Wednesday 21 July 2004 11:06, Martyn Welch wrote:
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> On Tuesday 20 Jul 2004 23:27, Andy Baxter wrote:
> > why not do it using cgi, to give a web interface? most people are
> > familiar with this, it's easy enough to write, and perl is a good
> > language for scripting command line tools like cdrecord.
> >
> > also, the interface could then be made available on other machines - you
> > could just copy an iso to the right directory on the shared fileserver,
> > put a disk in the burner machine, then open the web page, choose which
> > iso to burn, press a button and it would start cdrecord. The output could
> > be shown by making part of the page a subframe with a 5 second page
> > refresh on it.
>
> The thing is we are only planning to have one burner, we need some way of
> easily allowing users to work out whom has control of the device. If two
> people go to burn a CD at approximately the same time, with access to the
> burning process from each desktop, how do we ensure that the correct data
> is burnt to the CD and is taken home by the correct person. Thus I much
> prefer the plan to have a vertical app installed on a single machine.

i don't think it's that hard - just make a lockfile when someone starts using 
it, and delete it when they are done. It could be set either when they press 
the button to start burning, or earlier on when they start choosing files to 
burn etc. Then if someone accesses the page while the burner is being used, 
they will get a notice to wait until it is finished, plus maybe the 
username/machine name of the person using it. Mostly it's going to be used by 
people in the same room as each other, so i can't see this being too much 
problem.

> We haven't really sorted out user login procedure satisfactorily. Therefore
> I think it would be wise to only allow burning of predefined ISOs in the
> first instance.

I think this would make the burner much less useful than it could be - what if 
someone is working on some images in the gimp and wants to take them home on 
CD? Or they want to download one of the more unusual linux isos.

andy.

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Thanks, andy.