Integrating Win95 and Samba in detail

[Louis Mandelstam]

On Mon, 13 Oct 1997, Christian 'Dr. Disk' Hechelmann wrote:

> same drive letter, since some of the machines had more that one FAT partition.
> This was solved by using 4DOS and a DOS port of sed(1)... Works nice now :-)

Last time I checked, 4DOS was shareware i.e. you can't necessarily assume
it's free for use at no charge.

> The only thing I have to get around is that every bootdisk needs a different
> NetBIOS name... I guess I'll use parts of the IP for dynamic name generation...

At the time when I was using DOS to boot the install process, I used DOS
versions of GNU grep and cut to get the IP address from the output of
ipconfig.exe, then grep for that address in a table kept on the server
(hostname: ipaddr), then wrote the hostname to setup.ini and restarted the
msclient.   Ugly.

> > boot it from the hard drive's autoexec.bat (using loadlin.exe) in order to
> > re-install the system from the server, without using a diskette at all.
> 
> Well I thought of that too, but user stupidity kept me from that. Sure booting
> from the HD ist faster. 

I don't know what the problem with user stupidity is - my users don't
touch the keyboard or see a prompt during the entire process.   The only
thing they can do to hose things is to switch the machine off, unplug the
networl connection etc.  If they do, they are (a) deliberate and (b) when
they boot again, the process will just start all over.

> That's what bugs me too. I think we need something like chattr(1) expecially
> for the FAT fs to get the hidden & system attributes right. Then we could
> simply use tar from an linux bootdisk...

You don't.  MSDOS/Win95 doesn't seem to care.  I'm using cpio to extract a
tar, though I do have the IO.SYS pre-created and I suspect the attributes
are kept when it is overwritten by cpio.

> Well, I'm using DHCP to configure the clients. This applys to the bootdisk
> too, but the NetBIOS name seems to be hardcoded in the net\system.ini file...
> Ugly.

It does - the best I could do was to automatically alter system.ini and
restart the client.

Regards

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Louis Mandelstam              Tel +27 83 227-0712   Symphony  /|\   /|\
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