I think what he is asking is some way of having the drive installed on one machine and have the others be able to control and burn to it as if it were installed locally. DiskJuggler4 does this.
as for buring across a network, I do it all the time and have done it for years. I have an AMD 900MHz with 768MB RAM running WinXP SP1 as a "file server" (basically this means a WinXp machine with about 300GB+). I use my AMD 1.3MHz with 512MB PC2100 RAM running WinXP SP1 to burn data on a CD with my LiteOn 48X CDRW and to my Sony DRU-500A to make DVD-Rs. one thing you may want to do before doing this is to set BOTH NICs to 100MB full duplex and make sure you are connecting to a switch that is capable of doing 100MB full duplex (a switch will give better through put compaired to a hub). if you are only connecting 2 machines and do not have a router for broadband internet access, you can just use a CAT5 crossover cable and connect both NICs. You will have to assign an IP address for both machines (example is make one 192.168.1.1 and the other 192.168.1.2) I do have trouble burning at 48X, but 32X-40X is usually fine.
as bac noted, this will put a heavy load on your network. about 97% of the time I am the only one on the netowrk at home so it doesn't matter how much load there is on the network. I am always able to browse the internet and do whatever I want to on the machine I am burning to or my laptop.
one thing you can do to see how much of a load the burn is placing on the "server" or machine burning from, is to open the task manager. there is a tab for network traffic. click on that tab and it will show how much bandwidth is getting eaten up while burning. I have all 3Com 3C905C NICs running to a Linksys router/switch and the most the server gets to is 40% burning on the other machine at 40X.
if you really have $$$ to burn, get a GigaBit switch with all 1000MB ports and some 1000baseT NICs for all machines.