Win95 Full System Backup to Samba box?

[Wayne_Johnson at candle.com]

[Forgive me if this is not attributed, but lotus notes dosn't make it
easy...]

>However you might want to go for windows for workgroups for dos, this
would
>enable you to share disks from a DOS machine, if I recall correctly that
is
>simply a client. Sharing disks would enable you to use smbtar on a Unix
>system for a remote restore. I suppose you could get hold of a DOS copy of
>a tar and try sharing your reading remotely from the tape device, shared
>over SMB. However neither of these would get around the long file names
>problem, I suppose you could force creation of a LFN backup by setting up
>an RSHD on the PC (there's a free one around), rsh'ing to it to run a
>doslfnbk (this is a freeware(old versions)/shareware(most up to date
>versions) utility which will store and restore mangled name -> normal name
>backups, it will also backup attribs of files) and then run the backup.
>Although quite how you would force smbtar to use the mangled names the PC
>supplies I don't know.

Quite correct.  I was looking at a way of creating a diskless WfW but I
forgot about the mangleing problem.  Looks like the only to properly
restore a WinNT/Win95 system is to install it.  Is there a way to create a
diskless Win95 (i.e. a Win95 that boots and runs from a diskette, and
supports a Server function?

As another topic, I have been getting these errors from our backups of
WinNT systems:
tar file \Microsoft Office\Templates\Presentations\Presenting A Technical
Report - Dale Carnegie Training (R).pot name length exceeds NAMSIZ

It appears that there is a limit of 100 characters for a file in the tar
format file.  As I was looking at the tar format, I noticed that it was
extensible (i.e., you can enlarge the file header).  What would happen if
we tacked an extension on the end of the header?  Would most systems ignore
the additional data?  We might tuck the full Win32 file path and attributes
in this extension.  As long as it didn't exceed the 512 byte record size at
least.  Then we mangle the path to get a 100 character 'tar name'.

Any comments anyone?