virtualbox.org

Hello

I wish to use my laptop dvd drive remotely to start a guest on a networked pc.

Presently I can start a guest on virtualbox using an iso image on the dvd drive on the laptop if I mount the nbd device on the pc. However I can not start a live dvd/cd on the laptop to start a guest on the pc.

Firstly hal did not register the nbd device so I tried restarting hald to no avail.
I then tried copying the hal-device description of the dvd drive from the laptop over to the pc and amended the device description to show the new nbd device. This allowed virtulabox to show the dvd drive on a drop down but still it failed to read the dvd drive (error 003 in the log)
It may be that the hal description of the dvd drive needs further altering or I've missed something obvious.
I have searched the forums and I believe read the relevant bits of the manual but am now stumped.

Any suggestions or pointers would be welcome.

Does the network dvd drive actually work in the Host? If that doesn't even work, how do you think VB can access it? And aren't you a bit over your head with this? Why would you need a drive over a network if you can use your Host drive instead, or create an ISO on your laptop and transfer it to your PC. The performance of the drive will be very bad.

Thank you for your speedy reply.

The linux host machine has a cd drive which works perfectly and when the remote dvd drive is mounted on the host machine this too works but only when accessing an iso image on the dvd volume.
I envisaged using the remote dvd drive to try out new distros which I receive from my monthly linux magazine.
I can copy the whole dvd using dd and use scp to transfer the iso from the laptop (which has a dvd drive) to the host pc but was trying to effect a more elegant method i.e.

1. Boot the laptop with dvd drive (no VB and limited ram)
2. Boot pc with VB host
3. Place dvd in laptop dvd drive
4. Start nbd server on laptop
5. Start nbd client on pc
6. Add hal description of dvd drive to pc
7. Start VB on pc
8. Start a new guest on VB from the dvd on the remote laptop

Presently I'm stuck at point 8.
I can at this point mount the /dev/nbd0 on /mnt/dvdrom and then use this mount point to start an iso image on the remote dvd but I cannot use the cd/dvd Mount dvd/Host dvd drive oprion to mount the remote dvd. I can use the host cd drive and this works fine.
Maybe there is another way I can utilise the remote dvd drive on the pc other than nbd?
Or perhaps the hal object at point 6 needs amending, I'm unsure how much VB utilises hal, from peaking at some of the xml files under .Virtualbox I guessed it was just the device location i.e. /dev/nbd0 and I did try editing the Machine file but this did not work hence I added the hal object copied from the laptop. Perhaps I need a bespoke fdi file on the pc?

I welcome suggestions

I suggest that you look for answers elsewhere. As I stated before, is the DVD drive readable by your Host system in the first place. Get that working first, then try VB. This idea falls outside of the forum scope. Please try at a more specialized forum.

The penny drops...

Sorry I've been using the wrong terminology.

Substitute dvd drive for dvd-rom.

(I've edited previous post to reflect this!!)