diskless win95 and samba

[David Collier-Brown]

Clary Harridge asked...
> we are interested in  booting Win95 diskless from a SAMBA server.

Peter Debus <pdebus at turing.une.edu.au> cautioned
| 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

  This is utterly typical of large diskless labs... they haven't worked 
well since SunOS 3.5 (:-))

  My least favourite colleague came up with a brilliant hack for
Ultrix, Sunos 4 and NeXT: boot from the net and you get a reinstall.
  This has been used subsequently for three unix and numerous PC labs
in both industry and academia.

  I strongly recommend Mr Debus's alternative!  Boot linux and
refresh or reinstall Windows.  At Siemens' this required about two
minutes of my time to load a tape and boot the pc from floppy, then
walk away with the floppy in my pocket.  After about 6 minutes (refresh)
or 20 minutes (full install) the machine rebooted and the user was
running again.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | and astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | davecb at hobbes.ss.org, canada.sun.com
M2N 1Y3. 416-223-8968 | http://java.science.yorku.ca/~davecb