How to access a CD/DVD drive over the network?

Question

The CD/DVD drive of my notebook is broken. However, the drive from my desktop computer is working perfectly.

How can I access the CD/DVD drive from my desktop computer over the network? I want to put a DVD disc there and access it from my notebook.

Both computers have Gentoo/Linux. (but the solution ought to work on any Linux distribution)

Answer 1

Try sharing it over samba:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

and

[cdrom]
comment = CD Drive
path = /mnt/cdrom
public = no
writable = no

Answer 2

At first I thought about sharing the /dev/cdrom (actually, /dev/sr0) using either NFS or sshfs.

Then I tried that, and it does not work. Raw devices can't be shared using these technologies.

However, I can mount the cdrom somewhere (/mnt/cdrom and /media/cdrom are common places) and then share the mount point.

Using sshfs is easy to setup, as it doesn't require root permissions nor any configuration file. It's also "safe", as the file access permissions will be basically the same as the logged in ssh user. However, using NFS will lead to better performance (because it has less overhead, as it doesn't encrypt any data).