booting Win95 diskless from a samba server / tcpip net.exe

[Joerg Lenneis]

Clary Harridge <clary at elec.uq.edu.au> writes:

> Hi
> we are interested in  booting Win95 diskless from a SAMBA server.

Apart from the technical problems (see below), you are probably better
off to not use Windows 95 in this way. I (and a couple of other sites
I am aware of) have tried this and the whole setup is so bugridden as
to be nearly useless. (NB: Are you aware that PCI network controllers
are not directly supported in a diskless Win95 configuration? There is
actually a kludge around this, documented on the Lanworks web site,
but that gets complicated pretty quickly for larger installations.)

> 
> The stumbling block seems to be that the Win95 net.exe only supports
> the NETBEUI and IPX protocols.
> 
> 1) is anyone aware of a net.exe which would allow us to use TCP/IP ?
> 
> 2) can we somehow interface to samba using NETBEUI ?
> 

This is the technical problem: No NETBEUI and I think it is a) highly
unlikely that someone might implement it for any Unix variant b)
unlikely that Samba would support it even if the lower networking
layers were in place. You might want to try one of the Netware server
implementations under Linux, maybe that would work for booting.

> We are using the InCom bootroms and bootp to download the bootimage.
> Connecting to an NT server via NETBEUI works but we would like to be able to 
> dispose of the NT server and use SAMBA in its place.
> 

Good choice, they work really well. Have a look at
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/howto.html, they document a
setup with a standardized Windows 95 installation on the workstations
that can be redone in five minutes. They also use InCom bootproms. You
also might want to check out http://www.pyzzo.com/ for an inexpensive
utility to keep Windows installations in sync. Alternatively, you
could use perl under Windows 95 to hack up something similar yourself.


[...]

-- 

Joerg Lenneis

email: lenneis at statrix2.wu-wien.ac.at