Inside the Macbook Air ‘Remote Disc’ process

Jan 22, 2008 | Comment

As reported in an earlier article, the next update to Leopard will add a Sharing pane item called ‘DVD or CD Sharing’, which will facilitate booting to a remote optical disc from a Macbook Air (and possibly from other Macs).

The way the process works on the client side is by an agent that runs on the ‘main’ system called ‘ODSAgent’. ODSAgent, once enabled by the user in the Sharing pane, then adds an entry to the firewall and begins running. When the client machine (ex. Air) begins its boot process, it looks for the running agent on the network and finds it on the main system.

At that point it is able to utilize the resources on that disc as if it were locally attached. We did a little digging around inside of the ODSAgent app and found these strings that give us a little bit of a clue about how the agent works and interfaces with the client system.

We’ll publish more details as they become available.

ASKFIRST_MESSAGE_FORMAT = ““%1$@” on “%2$@” would like to use your %3$@ drive.”;
ASKFIRST_ACCEPT = “Accept”;
ASKFIRST_DECLINE = “Decline”;
ASKFIRST_DVD = “DVD”;
ASKFIRST_CD = “CD”;
ASKFIRST_DISC = “disc”;

EJECT_MESSAGE = “You are ejecting a disc that is being used by another computer. Are you sure you want to eject the disc?”;
EJECT_SUB_MESSAGE = “The remote computer will be disconnected from your computer.”;
EJECT_EJECT = “Eject”;
EJECT_DONT_EJECT = “Don’t Eject”;
EJECT_DISSENT_REASON = “DVD or CD Sharing”;