Integrating Win95 and Samba in detail

Christian 'Dr. Disk' Hechelmann drdisk at itlx01.it.fht-esslingen.de
Mon Oct 13 20:20:58 GMT 1997


On Mon, 13 Oct 1997, Louis Mandelstam 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.

Sure. But It's worth its money. And besides there are alternatives. Some people may
have Norton Utilities (DOS) which includes NDOS (which seems to be 4DOS in disguise).

> 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.

Well I now do it with 4DOS's @RANDOM function. Usually works like a charm :-)

> > 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.

Well the user in the envirionment I'm currently in are working on their thesises
for their diploma in computer science. We've got power-users (very few) that
usually do no harm. But then there are those that seem to have to (try to) install
loads of software or games hosing the machines... :-/ And the backdoors in Awards
BIOS aren't much of help too... So sometimes people do manage to completely skrew
the machine up...

> > 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

Well it actually does on some magic folders (e.g. %Winbootdir%\FONTS)...

NT is a whole other story though...

> tar, though I do have the IO.SYS pre-created and I suspect the attributes
> are kept when it is overwritten by cpio.

Well the attributes of Win'95 IO.SYS do not matter at all, you'd just make sure
its directory entry ends up in the first cluster of the root directory, or
else the bootloader doesn't find it. I learned that the hard way, wondering
why a machine won't boot.

> > 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.

Well at present I use the string NETINST and stick a random 3 digit number
at the end. Since usually not more than about 10 machines are installed in
a row, name collisions are rather rare and if it does haoppen, I'll just reboot
the machine in question or just go on to the next one...

	Ciao Chris
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