How to figure out devicename for my CDROM

You usually don't need to know about this sort of stuff. But one possibility to figure out the device name is to list the contents of /dev before and after you mount the CD and look at the difference. Or maybe 'df' will show you.

Note also that mounted drives show up under /Volumes, so try doing:
ls -l /Volumes
and then you could probably just use standard file paths for installation.

But let's step back a bit. I'm guessing that the real problem is that you are trying to administer an XServe from a remote login - i.e. you don't have the usual graphical environment.
You could make things much easier on yourself by installing VNC on the XServer and then using a VNC client on your local machine to show the screen of the XServe.
Note that you probably already have Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) installed on the XServe and this allows use of an ARD client from any Mac to do the same thing as above. And I have read that ARD uses VNC so it isn't even necessary to use a Mac as client - VNC clients are freely available for all platforms.

See also this old thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=35224

Thanks for the quick reply - my problem is really simple.

I do have access to the xserve - the instructions to copy the files is:
cp -r /devicename/* .

where devicename should be my CDROM drive.

I was trying to figure out how to figure out all my devices so I do not have to hunt for them in the future.

Select and copy via GUI (in the root account) may be all I need to do - I was worried that the unix copy may be more complete then the GUI copy....

I will try the commands you noted.

I was worried that the unix copy may be more complete then the GUI copy
No - in fact before Tiger, the Unix 'cp' command did not handle the "resource forks" that are present in some (usually older) Mac software, so use of Unix 'cp' would not copy everything.
Since you are on 10.3.9, that would apply to you. You should only use 'cp' for files that you know don't have resource forks. That would of course be true for any standard Unix software/files.

Found the devicename - the ls /dev did the trick.

For those interested, the devicename is "dynamic". The first device mounted (CDROM) gets rdisk1, second mounted (floppy) gets rdisk2. If you restart the machine, and mount floppy first, it gets rdisk1, etc.

Found the devicename - the ls /dev did the trick.
Ewwww... the output from that one is rather gawdy.

Maybe diskutil list or disktool -l would be a bit nicer.

-HI-

Nicer, but not the info I needed.

df, disktool, and diskutil are giving me identifiers and information associated to them, not the devicename. But these commands interesting information that I may need in the future.

Nicer, but not the info I needed.

df, disktool, and diskutil are giving me identifiers and information associated to them, not the devicename. But these commands interesting information that I may need in the future.
the command is:

df -h