Removable optical discs, both re-writable and write-once (WORM) have become increasingly attractive as mass storage devices. However using such devices on Sun workstations can be a problem since existing Sun SCSI device drivers do not fully support optical discs. For instance various optical disc drives such as the Pioneer Multi-Function Drive, are not supported at all. With others there is no explicit control over when users are allowed to remove discs, some types of discs cannot be used unless they are supplied pre-formatted, and discs with sector sizes other than 512 bytes/sector are not supported.

The Optical Disc Support Software (ODSS) package from K-PAR Archiving Software has been designed specifically for optical discs and overcomes problems with existing software. It allows most popular erasable, WORM and multi-function optical disc drives to be used on a Sun workstation, running the Solaris 2.X environment. When used in conjunction with K-PAR's Worm File System (WFS) it provides a simple way of using WORM discs from UNIX.

to top

Software components
The software consists of a device driver, a comprehensive suite of utilities, and an easy to use installation procedure. The device driver is a standard SunOS device driver, allowing optical disc drives to be attached to the workstation's integral SCSI controllers. It has full support for removable discs, locking them in the drive while they are in use to prevent corruption of the file system by inadvertent removal. It also fully supports partitioning of discs, allowing discs with differently defined partitions to be loaded without the need to re-boot the workstation.

Discs with 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 byte / sector sizes are supported. The driver supports the standard Sun UNIX File System (UFS) and UDF File System, and all the associated utilities such as mount, umount, du, df, newfs and fsck. All the usual disc I/O control functions (ioctls) are supported. The easy to use utilities allow the system manager to perform all the essential system administration functions required to support the optical disc, such as: formatting and reading the disc (in ISO standard format), displaying and modifying of the disc label, geometry and partition details, creating file systems on the disc and managing bad blocks.

to top

Availability
The software is available for Solaris SPARC 2.6 - 2.9 and Intel Solaris x86.

to top