Re: Booting Win95 with etherboot & samba.

[Joerg Lenneis <lenneis@wu-wien.ac.at>]

  Namsuk Kim:

  > Joerg Lenneis wrote:
  >>  It is possible to boot Windows 95 diskless, but buggy. There are
  >> two problems to be overcome:
  >>

  Does this mean out of Linux?  BTW, can a diskless win95 run network
  > dos games?  That's I am going to try.  Please, let me know.  I
  > don't want reinvent the wheel.

  >> - get a bootprom to boot Windows without harddisk. This is
  >> doable/has been done by commercial vendors.
  >>
  >> - Get Windows 95 to "do the right thing" after the boot, which
  >> would be to access the registry over the network. This is also
  >> possible but only via NetBEUI (this is the reason a setup with
  >> Windows NT works) or IPX. This unfortunately eliminates Samba as
  >> a network server (TCP only).

  > [snipped]

Let me be more explicit. The startup of a diskless Windows node is
normally done be transferring a floppy image (that is just a one to
one low level copy of an actual bootable floppy) that resides in a
file on the server to the client. The client software loads that image
into memory as a virtual file system and boots from the memory
image. The memory thus used can normally be reclaimed after the system
start. This single floppy only contains a very basic (and therefore
small) registry file because a full registry would not fit
sizewise. It is just enough to get a bit of real mode netoworking
going which is afterwards used to access the full registry on a file
server. That makes it possible to start Windows 95, which switches to
protected mode, reloads networking software and accesses the main
Windows 95 directory on the server. The problem is the networking that
takes place before Windows is started because only Netbeui or IPX are
supported, but not TCP/IP. You therefore need a fileserver that
supports one of these protocols to get the registry files across to
the client. That could be a Netware server, Windows NT or even another
Windows 95 host. I said before that that excludes Linux but come to
think about it that might not be true. There is an IPX implementation
under Linux as well as a free Netware server clone. Maybe that
combination would do the trick, but I have not personally tried it
(gave Windows NT a shot instead). It might be interesting, though.

The reason why we gave up on the diskless Windows 95 idea is that the
whole procedure is badly documented and the resulting installation
buggy as hell. I literally wasted weeks on it and was not the only one
to have this experience (see
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/~mvuilleu/configsc1/config.html for instance)
only to be left with various things that did not work as expected.



  >  What about using Mars?  One more question is that speed(eh!)?
  > Will it enough speed(100mhz) without feeling uncomfortable?

  > Namsuk Kim

Once you have everything up and running it depends very much on the
type of game. If it is something that loads everything at startup but
then does not access the disk any more you should not notice any
difference. The best way to try would be to install the software on a
file server, access it from the network in Windows 95 and see what the
speed is like. This would be compareable to the diskless situation.



--

Joerg Lenneis

University of Economics and Business Administration
Department for Applied Statistics and Data Processing
Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna, Austria

Tel. *43/1/31336 4758
email: lenneis@wu-wien.ac.at