Enabling DVD/CD Sharing 10.6.8 and 10.7.4

[rfreeborn]

I am needing to enable DVD/CD sharing on a group of iMacs running 10.6.8 and a group of MacBook Airs running 10.7.4 so the MBAirs can access DVD/CDs on the iMacs remotely. Does anyone have an good way to do that?

[talkingmoose]

What's the purpose for the MacBook Air machines accessing the discs across the network? Since you're already using Casper I'm assuming they're not discs containing software that you can add to Casper Admin.

Would a disc image created using Disk Utility and shared from a network share work better?

[rfreeborn]

The DVDs and CDs would be teacher/subject resource disc that are not going to be application or image base that we will be making available via JSS. We want them to have access to remote disc on the iMac in their classroom, if that makes sense. So they have acces to an optical drive since they won't have optical drives in their MB Airs.

[talkingmoose · Accepted solution]

Looks like enabling or disabling optical disc sharing is managed by launchd:

To enable DVD or CD Sharing:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ODSAgent.plist

To disable DVD or CD Sharing:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.ODSAgent.plist

The option to Ask me before allowing others to use my DVD drive is managed by a .plist file:

To enable this setting:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ODSAgent askFirst true

To disable this setting:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ODSAgent askFirst false

You can also use Casper's Managed Preferences to manage this option:

Domain: com.apple.ODSAgent
Apply Setting To: System Level Enforced
Key Name: askFirst
Key Type: Boolean
Value: true (or false)

With all that said, my suggestion would be to instead use Disk Utility to create a disk image (.dmg) of the CD or DVD and put it on a file share for folks to copy to their computers. Users only need to double-click it and the mounted disk image will appear just like a CD or DVD on the Desktop. You can keep your original media in a protected storage area.

[rfreeborn]

Thanks moose, this worked perfectly. Agree about the .dmgs and we do this with most of our resource CDs and DVDs but wanted teachers to have access to do this if needed. Getting MacBook Airs for first time and had a lot of teachers upset about no built-in drives and didn't want to buy an external for all of them. Probably won't get used that much down the road but this will make them happy.

Thanks again.