Cross network burning guide with NeroNET at informit

June 18, 2005

My blood pressure still raises when I think back to when my company required the sharing of a printer. This was in the Windows for Workgroup days and I would have to send a print job up to the front office, because my "workstation" was not blessed with it's own printer. Once sending the job off on the ethernet, I would stroll merrily through the administrative areas, chatting with secretaries along the way to retrieve my documents, only to find to my dismay, that the damn laser printer was out of paper!

But I
digress, that was many years ago and is past history. Fast forward to the 21st century, technology has provided a solution for modern day network publishing on the venerable optical drive recorder, leveraging their use for greater utility and productivity. However, it seems there's not a lot of choices, at least according to the author of this guide. But after some frustrating research, he found the NeroNET client server application for disc recorders and printers.

Below, you can see a synopsis of the tool from the Nero website. There is also a caption from the guide written by Kulvir Bhogal at the bottom titled "Getting Ready to Burn".

How does NeroNET work?

NeroNET consists of two components:

NeroNET Server
This component runs on computers with a CD and/or DVD burning function (burn servers). The hardware configuration and user administration are also carried out here.
If the burn server has a label printer, labels can also be printed using NeroNET server.
NeroNET Client
This component runs on the individual users' computers. As NeroNET can only be used together with a full version* of Nero, NeroNET Client naturally has the same comprehensive scope of functions as your Nero full version. You can thus create combinations for CDs/DVDs and prepare labels, which you can then burn and print using NeroNET server.

Getting Ready to Burn

For this article, I assume you are running either Windows XP or Windows 2000. NeroNET can work with other Windows versions, with slight changes to the procedure outlined in this article. If you are using a version of Windows other than XP or 2000, I suggest reading through NeroNET's product documentation to learn more about recording over a network using the Windows versions.

You must install a full version of Nero Burning ROM on the client machines with which you want to access a recorder on another machine. If you have an OEM version of Nero, you need to uninstall it, purchase a full version of the software, and install it in place of the OEM version. You can get a trial edition of the full, retail version of Nero Burning ROM good for 30 days at http://www.nero.com. At the time of this writing, Nero Burning ROM was in version 6.6.0.8.

Use of NeroNET requires that you be running a full version of Nero Burning ROM (at least version 5.5) on each client for which you want to share a recording device that physically resides on another machine. If you are looking to burn DVD+R/+RW/-R/-RW/-RAM media, you need to be running Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.1.6 or higher. As stated earlier, the NeroNET client component comes innately embedded within Nero Burning ROM's full retail versions.

Luckily, the NeroNET server component you need will not cost you anything unless you plan to have more than three users share your DVD/CD recorder. That's right, the NeroNET server is "free of charge" for three users. At the time of this writing, NeroNET was in version 1.2. It can be downloaded from Nero.com at http://ww2.nero.com/us/neronet-prog.html. NeroNET runs on the server without needing Nero Burning ROM.