Creating virtual drive

[max_chock]

Hi all,

I want to build a program/project for my cybercafe.

My cyber cafe have 45 PCs, and is running on Gb LAN. There are over hundred of games inside a PC, so the headache part is to update the game or program 1 by 1 (Online game and many LAN game such as Counter-strike update every week). Since most of the games doesnt involve in system folder, I plan to build a file server and have all the games inside, and all the 45 PC will "map" the hard disk in the file server, and directly launch the game from the "mapped" drive

I don't want it to show as "network drive" under My Computer, so I plan to write a small program to make it pretend as local hard disk like the program below does:

http://www.southrivertech.com/products/webdrive/index.html

Thanks & regards.

[TheCPUWizard]

Have you considered using SMS to manage the PC's????

http://www.microsoft.com/smserver/default.mspx

[max_chock]

No, because this is not just about manage the PC's, and some automated games update function have to be done. Any idea??

[MrViggy]

Doesn't SMS work with third party apps?

Viggy

[TheCPUWizard]

You can push out nearly any type of update with SMS. :)

One other thing *many* CyberCafe's are doing is using Virtualization. This allows the machines to be effectively reset back to a known condition between users. This is a great way to eliminate corruption (either accitendal or intentional).

[SuperKoko]

What's the problem with a NFS network drive?

A network drive has a letter and is not different from other local drives, except that they've a little flag indicating their nature as there is a flag indicating that a drive is a floppy disk drive, local hard disk drive or cd-rom drive.

From the point-of-view of applications, there is absolutely no difference except if they're perverse and call the GetDriveType() function. For example games with a CD check system checks that drives are of type "cd-rom".

Is there any thing like that you want to avoid?

Note: IMHO Windows should let the user (at least the administrator who has the power of modifying & installing drivers) lie about the type of a device.

The only fundamental difference that I see between an FTP drive and a NFS drive is the protocol (based on high level operations for FTP and on low-level block operations for NFS).

[MrViggy]

You can push out nearly any type of update with SMS. :)

One other thing *many* CyberCafe's are doing is using Virtualization. This allows the machines to be effectively reset back to a known condition between users. This is a great way to eliminate corruption (either accitendal or intentional).
Not to take this too off topic, but how does "virtualization" work? Are the machines basically diskless clients that "reboot" between users?

Viggy

[TheCPUWizard]

The two leading virtualualization products are VmWare (marketed by VmWare) and VirtualPC (marketed by Microsoft). Take a look using your favorite search engine.

Here, I am working with 3 physical computer systems, but running upwards of 20 virtual machines... :D :D :D

[MrViggy]

Right, duh! I didn't think of VmWare as "virtualization", but yes that's what it is. I have used VmWare before. However, I got lucky, and have two machines here at work (I only need two, Linux and Windows), and SYnergy works for me! ;)

Playing with VmWare once, I had a virtual Win2K install on my Linux box; a virutal Linux install in the virtual Win2K machine; then one more virtual Win2k install in the virtual Linux machine (that was in the virtual Win2k machine). It all worked great! A tad slow, but it worked!

Viggy

[TheCPUWizard]

Tad Slow

Probably not enough physical RAM....

As I said I have 20+ virtual machines, running about every realistic combination of operating systems and system environments.

Being able to "reset" a machine is invaluable in testing installation processes.

[max_chock]

The reason i wanna to create virtual drive instead of just mapping the drive is becoz some files maybe written before or during each application/game. Instead of writting on the physical network drive, i prefer it can write temporaly on the local drive, so it won't have chances to affect each other.