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Jim2000

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DOS and linux connectivity on a LAN

Ha ha! Not that easy I am afraid! Ok, I have a box downstairs that will be Win95 :-( It's all my house mates can use! ;-) And my two boxes upstairs (Linux of course ;-). One is the DNS server, primary nameserver and the NFS server. This is the one we are concrened with for the moment. I need to install Windows 95 from CD on the machine downstairs. It has nothing on it so I would need to boot from a disk. Here's the trick! It has _NO_ CD-ROM. So I need to tell it to use my one upstairs and install from there. How do I do this!?? This ones worth a few points if someone can point me to a place with good resources for setting up a DOS bootdisk with ne2000 and TCP/IP support and of course NFS or an alternative solution / protocol.

Cheers

Jim
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mnewnham

I suggest spending $10 on a used CDROM drive and saving yourself 1,0000000 hours of work.

The main problem I see is that Win 95 requires a reboot after the base os is loaded, but _before_ the Network installation is done, so even if you could see a shared device before the reboot, you have to let Win 95 boot itself, therefore losing access to the Network.
Another alternative would be to pull the drive from the win95 machine, hang it off the other one and copy the 95 install files to it. But I agree with mnewnham's premise - doing a network install this way would not be worth the effort
these alternatives are good but if you want to have a cross-platofrm networking adventure this can be done
check out http://support.microsoft.com/support/downloads/DP763.ASP
to download the MS networks client for dos
for the server side just run samba on linux
With the rescue disk from SuSE Linux you can setup a little linux
system in RAM. If your harddisc on the WIn box is big enough for
two partitions you may copy the hole win95 CD to one of them via
NFS.

well it's not fast but easy to do...
it is polite to post as a comment first
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ASKER

I have done it myself (below is how I did it if anyone is interested). A I do not own SuSE linux - however, I could have created a linux disk that use a RAM drive. TCP/IP and Samba was the answer.

A DOS boot disk with NT extras (tcptsr and net stuff) and of course the usual NIC and packet driver. Configure samba on the Linux server (great package ;_) and then give the host an IP entry in hosts and DNS etc. Once the host has booted with the disk do

net use x: \\server\share

Of course you need to have a user name and password on the samba server and then in the system.ini on the host have the username and workgroup in there and add in the lmhosts file the server.

Jim
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adam923

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No! I did it myself! I rejected the answer cos it was unsuitable! Sorry.