# Sharing udev device nodes over network

## Galumph

I recently purchased one of the new Mac Minis, and as some of you might know, these macs don't come with DVD drives. I do have another computer running Gentoo with two other DVD drives connected to it though. Is there a way to "share" these drives' device nodes over a network, the end result being two files on my Macintosh which are identical to the two device nodes, and that writing to them automatically writes to the real nodes?

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## NeddySeagoon

Galumph,

Yes and no.  /dev entries are not real files - they provide access to thinks inside the kernel.

You can share the contents of a DVD drive over NFS, or with some other network filesystem.

If you want to write to the remote DVD it gets a bit harder.  There were one or two older CD/DVD writing packages that supported remote writing but I don't know of athin current.

Tell us the problem you really want to solve, rather than your perceived solution to it.

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## Galumph

The real problem is that I want to read/write from/to the drives on the mac without buying extra hardware to connect them to it.

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## Ant P.

You may be able to get it to work like a local device using iSCSI, it's unlikely though.

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## NeddySeagoon

Galumph,

Its a bit ugly but for reading, you can mount the DVD someplace on the local box then share it with say, sshfs, nfs or any other network filesystem

If its for a single user and you already have ssh access, sshfs is the way to go.  sshfs can read and write but not to a device that has an inhernelt read only filesystem. 

You can burn to a remote DVD over a ssh tunnel too.

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## krinn

You can also mount the cd/dvd image with loop to get a local dvd like result. For read purpose.

The hard part would be writing, i would prefer send the task to my server and let it write the media instead of direct writing thru the network.

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## roravun

If you run linux on your mac mini, then you can export dvd block device with NBD (Network Block Device).

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