How can I transfer floppies back and forth between MS-DOS and Sparc?

	For Solaris2.2 and above you can use the Volume Manager to
	control your disks and CD-ROM's. Under SunOS 4.0 there are two 
	packages which allow you to do mount floppies (mtools and mntdisk).
	Both of these packages use the 3-1/2inch floppy drive available
        on most SPARCstations.  Mntdisk can be used to manage CD-ROMS
	and other removable media types as well.

	With the advent of the Volume manager in Solaris2.2 these programs
	have been rendered somewhat obsolete. Under Solaris2.x use
	volcheck -v to check in a floppy. Than you can use normal UNIX
	commands on this floppy like cd, mkdir, cp, mv, and ls. It usually 
	gets mounted on /vol/floppy0

	Mtools writes directly to the floppy device and it does not
	require any special privileges. It is faster than mntdisk
	but it requires the user to learn a new set of commands.
	A copy of mtools can be found at 

		prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/

	With the proper changes to the source code mtools can even
	be made to work with the Solaris2.x Volume Manager. All 
	you need to do is make mtools look in /vol/dev/diskette/...
	for the floppy devices. 

	mntdisk "mounts" the floppy using the "pcfs" filesystem type. Once
	mounted you can use regular UNIX commands(cp,mv,and rm)
	to access it. The pcfs filesystem is quite slow compared
	to using mtools above.  Mntdisk is available in your local 
	comp.sources.misc archive, Volume 22, Issues 31-33. 
	Mntdsk can be used to mount CD-ROMS and even UFS floppies.

	You should never use "setuid" shell scripts for mounting floppies.
	Also, C programs that use the system() function call should
	not be used either. Both can open up huge security holes
	which hackers can be used to break into your system.

	
	Last Updated:  January 27, 1995.

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