Remote CD/DVD writing with n-c-b

[nautilus-dev ahtech net]

	Hi there!

	I am studying the possibility of remote writing of CDs/DVDs. I
have a production LAN where none of the workstations have a burner,
while there are some at some other machines (let's say they're servers).

	I'd like for the users to use the Nautilus cd burner to burn CDs
on the remote burners. But AFAIK, there's no support for that in n-c-b.

	I've alreaady tried (succesfully) remote cd burning with
cdrecord (it uses RSCSI for that). Sure, it works, and there are also
other GUI apps that support it (such as X CD Roast) but I definitely
would like to use Nautilus for that.

	And I haven't found this topic discussed in this list.

	AFAIK, n-c-b gathers information about burners reading
/proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info. It doesn't do a cdrecord -scanbus because it
may be slow (and parsing of the ouput prone to cdrecord output changes).

	However, obviously, remote burners offered by userspace tools
such as RSCSI would never show up in such kernel info. Since I consider
remote burning a very useful feature to add to n-c-b, what about
allowing n-c-b to use "cdrecord -scanbus" as a way to query burners, at
least only for remote burners?

	Here is my proposal/idea/suggestion:

	in the burning dialogue, allow for a tab/extra section which
says something like "check for remote writers" and a place to specify
IPs where n-c-b may check for writers availability. Then, and only for
remote drives, do a "cdrecord -scanbus" and add the extra results to the
dropdown of available writers. (User won't complain because of slowness
while querying for remote writers, since she will assume remoteness!)

	Then, almost out-of-the-box (since cdrecord does the hard job)
remote CD/DVD writing is supported within n-c-b.

	How does it sound? Any other ideas? Suggestions?

	Alvaro