Communicator 4.03, Linux and remote execution

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, Dave Wreski wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Hi all.  I wonder if anyone has setup Communicator 4.03 to run from a
> > samba machine, serving NT 3.51 and 4.0 workstation machines.

> you might also want to do this:
> 
> 1) search for the preferences dlls, and export them to separate files.  
> each dll is registered under a CLSID.  there are about 17 of these for 
> 4.01.  you can then put these in _one_ file, double-click on it and you 
> will have the preferences dlls registered on a new machine.  hurrah.

[applications can register dlls under Class IDs (CLSIDs).  new versions 
of a dll can be detected by creating a new CLSID under which the dll is 
_also_ registered...]
 
> 2) always and only create a user named defaultuser, and store their 
> preferences in \\cb1-gw\homes\.netscape.  then, search the registry for 
> default user, and make sure that _this_ entry is also in the above 
> manually created registry file.

sorry, search registry for "defaultuser"

> 3) make a copy of the prefs.js file in each ~/.netscape directory.  have 
> a default prefs.js file, with some odd things like DEFAULT_USER in it.  
> set up a perl script or use ex to substitute DEFAULT_USER with the real 
> username, called from the adduser.bat script or some other suitable 
> arrangement.

the prefs.js file is in dos text format (^Ms at end of lines).  it is 
easily editable by hand, despite the comments at the top telling you not 
to ;-)

> > I'd like to have a 'public' directory where installation binaries can be
> > kept, and have each user run it from this share, instead of having to copy
> > it locally, then execute it.

no problem.  remember, however, that for each application that you 
install, you will need to do a hair-raising amount of manual 
configuration.  once you have detected and created the appropriate .reg 
files, you can just double-click on them (or get them to be installed at 
domain logon time: a method to do this was posted last month to the 
digest) and the appropriate registry entries will be added for that 
application.

ah, shag - i forgot to mention.  you can't force windows _not_ to put 
dlls in the system directory.  therefore, you need to review the dlls 
stored in the windows system directory, and put them in, say, 
\\cb1-gw\applications\system.  then, do a net use u: 
\\cb1-gw\applications, and then put in the c:\autoexec.bat file path = 
%path%;u:\system.  or, copy all relevant system files into the c:\windows 
directory.  (translate this as appropriate for NT).

WATCH OUT: don't overwrite MSVCRT.dll, or MSVCRT20.dll, or MSVCRT40.dll 
on an NT workstation with windows 95 versions of these dlls!  (there are 
a few others: can't remember what they are).


Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (lkcl at switchboard.net)
Web site under construction  (http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl)
"Confront difficulties while they are still easy"