samba - Oct 1997 - Integrating Win95 and Samba in detail

On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Andrew Speakman wrote:
> 1. MsClient boot floppy. Used to boot up and connect to network drives
>    on a SAMBA server. Fits on one floppy disk.
Yes, that's what I did at first also.  My problems with this were:

1. the client wants to write to the boot diskette, and I wanted to be able
   to write-protect the disk to prevent damage, viruses etc.
   I could have installed a custom critical error handler in DOS to absorb
   the errors if I felt it was worthwhile.

2. PnP unreliability on some machines (though if I read you correctly,
   you're using DOS msclient, but not setup.exe - instead using a premade
   archive like I am.

3. General uglyness and inflexibility in DOS scripting.

Using a Linux boot disk also fits onto a single diskette, but solves all
my problems with the above, plus gives me the added advantage that I can
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.
> 2. MRZIP from the Linux remote Boot mini HOWTO. Used to download compressed
>    raw disk image. See
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/howto.html
I would possibly be doing this, but my scenario doesn't allow this because
the PC hard drives are not all the same size, so with a raw image I would
at best have to settle for having the lowest common denominator as the C:
partition size on all the machines, and at worst have partition tables
which didn't work on all machines. 
> This works very well (takes about 10 minutes for a 300 Mb install).
Yes, I'm getting about the same speed over a HDX 10Mbps ethernet, good to
know I'm not loosing much speed due to vfat filesystem overhead.
> I still find it necessary to configure by hand at the end. The prinicipal
> problems being the ones you mention in your post to the SAMBA list - 
> setting the netbios hostname and Plug and Play problems at reboot.
Well, setting the netbios name was solved quite easily once I started
using a Linux boot disk instead of a DOS one.

The Linux boot disk uses bootpc to get its IP config from the server,
which also gives it the hn (hostname) tag.  There are stored as env
variables.

As one of the last steps before the routine reboots into Windows 95, it
does this:

(You may want to send your kids out of the room for this - it's not
pretty):

[some site-specific lines removed]
(echo -e '@echo off\r'
 echo -e 'regedit awis-upd.reg > nul\r'
) > autoexec.bat

echo -e 'REGEDIT4\r
\r
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\control\\ComputerName\\ComputerName]\r
"ComputerName"="'${HOSTNAME}'"\r
\r
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\VxD\\VNETSUP]\r
"ComputerName"="'${HOSTNAME}'"\r
\r' > awis-upd.reg

I'm not positively sure the second ComputerName entry really needs to be
set - I've done some testing with it and it actually seems that not
setting it doesn't break anything (the correct name still comes up in
Network Setting's Identification tab, etc) but since the rest of the
Identification tab's settings (like Machine description) go into the
VNETSUP key, I thought I'd just play it safe and enter the info into both
keys.

I don't show it above, but I do several other things using this .REG file
as well, such as setting the machine description field to tell me the
version of the boot disk and install tree that were used, as well as the
date of the install.  Makes it easy to find things using smbclient -L.
The bit that does this is (also under VNETSET:

"Comment"="w/s '${CLIENTVER}/${DISKVER}' - '$(date
+%Y/%m/%d)'"\r

Regards

---------------------------------------------------------------|-----|--
Louis Mandelstam              Tel +27 83 227-0712   Symphony  /|\   /|\
Linux systems integration     http://sr.co.za       Research {   } {   }
Johannesburg, South Africa    mailto:louis@sr.co.za (Pty)Ltd {___} {___}

On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Louis Mandelstam wrote:
> > 1. MsClient boot floppy. Used to boot up and connect to network drives
> >    on a SAMBA server. Fits on one floppy disk.
> 
> Yes, that's what I did at first also.  My problems with this were:
I still use that, it allows me to install Win95, NT 4.0, and Linux from one
disk with a nice Menu (Novell's NMENU).
> 1. the client wants to write to the boot diskette, and I wanted to be able
>    to write-protect the disk to prevent damage, viruses etc.
>    I could have installed a custom critical error handler in DOS to absorb
>    the errors if I felt it was worthwhile.
I solved that by packing the whole NET directory in a self extracting archive
and using RAMDRIVE.SYS to get a writeable drive in which the ms-client may
write what it wants... As a side effect it boots faster now :-) This also
freed up a lot of space on the floppy (around 500kb)... The only thing was,
that depending on the machine the name of the virtual drive was not on the
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 :-)
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...
> 2. PnP unreliability on some machines (though if I read you correctly,
>    you're using DOS msclient, but not setup.exe - instead using a
premade
>    archive like I am.
Yeah, I also had fun with PnPray... Putting DWGFGMG.SYS (from ICU) on the
bootdisk seemed to have made things more stable.
> 3. General uglyness and inflexibility in DOS scripting.
I solved that by using 4DOS instaed of command.com. :)
> Using a Linux boot disk also fits onto a single diskette, but solves all
> my problems with the above, plus gives me the added advantage that I can
> 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 would possibly be doing this, but my scenario doesn't allow this
because
> the PC hard drives are not all the same size, so with a raw image I would
> at best have to settle for having the lowest common denominator as the C:
> partition size on all the machines, and at worst have partition tables
> which didn't work on all machines. 
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...
> > This works very well (takes about 10 minutes for a 300 Mb install).
Yep, about the same figure here.
> The Linux boot disk uses bootpc to get its IP config from the server,
> which also gives it the hn (hostname) tag.  There are stored as env
> variables.
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.

	Ciao Chris
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| used Windows 95" -- Anonymous                                           |