diskless win95 and samba

[Peter Debus]

You can use the real-mode MSCLIENT or LANMAN client from microsoft,
which includes tcp/ip support for their "net.exe".

However, we aborted the idea of going totally diskless after reading 
experiences of others. The main hurdles being Win95's netsetup
procedure and the limitations of the real-mode tcp/ip client, not to 
mention Win95's "stability" running over the top of the real-mode
client.

Unfortunately there is no other option I am aware of, other than booting
from an NT server - which I have been told, but have not experienced myself,
is painfully slow if booting a whole computer lab at once, with clients
timing out and needing rebooting 2 or 3 times before the whole lab
comes online.

Since you are using the InCom bootroms you should read the Linux's
mini howto "Remote-Boot", found at 
	http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/howto.html

The solution is quite impressive and includes WHY they decided
to abort the totally diskless option.

We used a variation on the solution mentioned above using the free
netboot package found at Linux mirror sites. I hope to document it 
soon and post its location to this list. In brief it uses netboot
bootroms and Linux with initial ramdisk to present user with coice
of operating systems, Linux then checks and prepares Win95 partitions,
cycles the machine to boot from local hard disk. If the user chose
Linux, the boot process simply continues without checking Win95 
partition.

The main problem with non-diskless Win95 clients is protecting the
local disk. The solution we and the example in "Remote-Boot" howto
adopted was to check and refresh entire Win95 partition. If the partition
is kept small, this is not as slow as it sounds.


Peter Debus
Computer Systems Administrator
School of Mathematical Computer Sciences
University of New England
Armidale NSW 
Australia

Ph: 61 (0)267 73 2412 Fax: 61 (0)267 73 3312
> Hi
> we are interested in  booting Win95 diskless from a SAMBA server.
> 
> 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 ?
> 
> 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.
> 
> Thanks for any advice you can offer.
> 
> Please email any replies.
> 
> -- 
> regards			Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering,
> Clary Harridge		University of Queensland, QLD, Australia, 4072
> 			Phone: +61-7-3365-3636	Fax:   +61-7-3365-4999
> 			INTERNET: clary at csee.uq.edu.au