CD LAN Setup
Gerry,
I don't work in the Main Reading Room. I work in Cataloging
Distribution Service, developing CD-ROM products to sell outside of LC.
From what the tech support people tell me, they are satisfied with the
performance of the Optinet software. That is hearsay though. I have not
worked with it myself.
No LAN management software is used on the reading room network. The
Optinet software accesses the Net-Bios protocols directly. The LAN appears
to be another disk drive to the user workstation. This means that the
retrieval software has to be installed on each workstation. This eats up a
lot of disk real estate, but I understand that it improves response time.
Another reason why they can do without LAN management software is that it
is a dedicated LAN which only runs one application, the access program to
the CD-ROM discs. Incidentally, there are about a dozen different titles
on the CD-ROM server.
I hope this helps. Phil