ISO/ZIP mounted as shares.. anyone see this?

So I was playing with pismo file mount, located here
http://www.pismotechnic.com/pfm/ap/
which allows you to mount zip and iso files as a sort of network drive. I have also been messing with making ISO's of large file sets. The intention was initially to get larger files to transfer over a local network faster because an ISO is a contiguous file which should transfer faster.

However, I found that it is no faster because of the extracting of the ISO. The ISO is just a container basically. Even a zip or rar file using storage mode takes more time than if you were to just download the directory and all files as is.

In playing with pismo, I could see zip/iso mounts, but was actually trying to write/modify the contents inside. No luck there yet. However, it has led to an interesting new sharing method.

What I have been doing is using winCDemu for some time for my virtual drive. I decided to share the virtual drive, simply as (v) or (x) or whatever. I make the share generically named. when you then look at my shares you always see (v) but unless an ISO is mounted, it gives an error that there is no media or hdd, which makes sense. But when you do mount an ISO it is shared as (v).

Why is this interesting? Well, partially because you can share up say 5 virtual drives, then mount an ISO and it is instantly shared, yet when you eject the virtural drive it is still a share, but pretty much neutered.

Now Pismo allows you to mount ISOs or ZIPs. So, after my virtual drive is made and shared as (v), I mount either an ISO or ZIP using Pismo to drive (v), and now I can share zip files too.

This makes an easy way to create some shares that are sort of permanent, and read only, that you only need to mount things into to have it usable, rather than actually creating the share when you need to.

Granted not everything can be in ISO, but ZIP is pretty easy, especially if you are not compacting but just storing.

Has anyone experience with this at all? I have not really seen mention of it before, but I have a hard time believing it has not been done.

And while on this topic, does anyone know of a way to write/modify inside an ISO file directly from explorer?

Cheers.

Sul.

 

I don't know of any way that can be done without extracting the ISO first using the likes of UltraISO.

*Edit* MagicISO has explorer integration but I'm not sure how this works I've never tried it.

http://www.magiciso.com/

 

You can do it easily in Linux.
Mount the image as a loopback device and then read/write inside it.
Not sure if this helps in any way ...
Mrk

 

Yes, I see some gpl/gnu apps for linux, too bad. I have yet to find anything for windows at all.

The closest I come is using pismo to create what is called a personal folder. This is an archive of sorts, erm, not really but it resembles it. Regardless, it creates one file that can be mounted, compressed and encrypted. It does allow to mount as a directory or a drive, and you can read/write if you desire.

Thanks though.

Sul.