Setup DVD burner on WYSE terminal

[coposg]

Hi all,

We have a Citrix farm running MPS4 using a mixture of WYSE 3125 and 3150 terminals on a W2K Server environment with SP4.
I have purchased a number of external DVD recorders and have set them up without a problem to read DVD's, but as soon as I try to burn data to the disk, Citrix does not recognise them as CD recorders, rather generic USB devices, and as such I cannot use DVD copy software to burn to disk.
Is there an easy way I can configure the devices to be recognised as DVD recorders? I am guessing this is at the Citrix level and not the WYSE terminal level as the thin client recognises the burner is there and can read off it?
Or alternatively am I approaching this totally the wrong way? Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks
Steve

 

[ascotta]

Well, I think with respect you may be approaching from wrong angle.

Even if said items worked the way t'was imagined, the data will be going across network to these items, and slowly too. Remember that it would be like burning to a network PC. WHich I have not tried, but as it is slow enough on a local PC I would imagine that this is not the way to go.

[blue] A perspective from the other side!![/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[coposg]

Thanks for the feedback Scott, is it something you have come across often? I wouldn't have thought it was something unusual so perhaps there is a better way to approach it?

 

[ascotta]

I have never cme across it, however, I have mainly been solutions based, this sonds a bit more strstegic.

[blue] A perspective from the other side!![/blue]

Cheers
Scott

 

[patrickrouse]

I've discussed this with both Citrix and Microsoft, and there is no current support for such operations. The only way I know to do this is to install the DVD Burner and software on an XPe Thin Client and access the data written outside of the terminal server environment, i.e. use the XPe terminal like a PC for this specific operation.

You do realize that burning a DVD is a CPU, Memory and Bandwidth intensive operation that may never work on a thin-client. On a PC a large cache is used to buffer the information being written to the media. This will not exist on a thin client, as there is only flash memory, which is often read only and <256MB. If the software were installed on a Citrix Server, you'd have to have a perfect network connection to successfully burn a CD or DVD and likely saturate the server's CPU, use a sh!tload of RAM and a lot of bandwidth.

If bandwidth is not a concern, I can ask Citrix if this is something they can support on VDI, i.e. thin client connecting to XP Pro or Vista Desktop hosted on VMware.



Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

http://www.sessioncomputing.com

 

[coposg]

Patrick,

Thanks for your response, it seems as though I might be angling to do something that (A) is not recommended and (B) may adversely impact on our (currently stable) production environment. The bandwidth query is an interesting one - bandwidth is not overly abundant, and we have a mixture of older PC's and thin clients so I may investigate using the DVD burners on the PC's, or just leave them on thin client purely for CD/DVD viewing purposes.

Thanks

Steve

 

[patrickrouse]

I think doing this on a PC with sw installed locally is your only option (currently). Will you have access to the data you need to write to DVD, outside of Citrix?

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

http://www.sessioncomputing.com

 

[coposg]

Yes, any data that needs to be written will be on a file share on our network, so on a PC I can copy to a local drive then burn from there, but the only option on a thin client even if I could get the burner working would be to allow access to the local Citrix server, which goes against our current organisational policy.

 

[dreameur]

One thing to keep in mind also is that the map of USB ports under Citrix is not supported except for sync. with PDA devices.

Regards