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Another piece of a puzzle...
Authored by: daniel_steffen on Mar 22, '03 12:04:12AM

This has nothing to do with "internet-enabled" disk images, it uses a capability of hdid that has existed at last since 10.1: mounting disk images over http.

I've certainly used this sucessfully to mount disk images from my own apache server, so it's not restricted to .mac accounts at all, but you may have to configure apache settings to get good performance, as detailed in the hdid manpage:

Mounting Images via HTTP
       In  addition  to mounting image files from local or remote
       mounted filesystems, one can also mount image  files  from
       HTTP  servers.   For  flat  image  files  (UDIF images, or
       AppleSingle/MacBinary encoded NDIF image files) mounting a
       image is a matter of passing the http:// URL to hdid:

              hdid http://server.company.com/Images/stuff.dmg

       If  the  image  file  to be served via HTTP is a dual fork
       NDIF image that is not encoded  into  a  flat-file  format
       such as AppleSingle, and the HTTP server is running on Mac
       OS X, dual fork files may be detected and supported.  Such
       dual-fork  files must be moved or copied using the Finder,
       ditto -rsrcFork, or some other  resource-fork-aware  tool.
       Properly  copied  dual-fork  files  on a UFS volume have a
       ._filename file in addition to the filename you see in the
       Finder (i.e.  stuff.img would also have ._stuff.img in the
       same directory).

       In either case, one would specify  the  URL  to  the  data
       fork, and hdid will determine if it is necessary to access
       the secondary file.

       Accessing dual fork files on HFS+ filesystems via HTTP  is
       only supported if the HTTP server is on a Mac OS X system.
       It is possible that some options on the web  server  could
       disable access to the resource fork on an HFS+ volume, but
       no such options have yet been found.

       Browsing images via HTTP is  much  more  pleasant  if  the
       server  settings  are  modified  to  be  more  friendly to
       highly-persistent clients.  In particular for Apache, Max-
       KeepAliveRequests should be increased significantly beyond
       100 or set to 0 (unlimited) and KeepAliveTimeout should be
       boosted  to  at least 30 (seconds).  Increasing the number
       of simultaneous clients may also be desirable  because  of
       the  increased  delay  before clients are forcibly discon-
       nected.

       While it is not directly related to mounting via  hdid(1),
       informing  your  web  server  that '.dmg' (and others) are
       extensions  associated  with  the   MIME   type   applica-
       tion/octet-stream  will allow web browsers to download the
       files rather than try to display them.   For  apache,  you
       add   the   extensions   to   the   appropriate   line  in
       /etc/httpd/mime.types.


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