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Remote Booting Windows95: Good, Bad And Ugly

The Process The remote boot process itself begins as it does in the DOS/Windows 3.1 environment, with the client machine requesting a boot image from the file server. The server supplies the requested image to the client, where the image is opened in memory. But this is where the similarity between the two processes ends--the Ugly.



Setting up our server-based install of Windows95 was a fairly easy process. We used the NETSETUP.EXE utility found on the Windows95 CD-ROM. The MSBATCH.INF created by this process can be easily modified to build remote boot environments. For example, we were able to incorporate the UPDATES.INF installer from Service Pack 1 into our install. In order to enable our booting workstations to find their specific registries and individual default networking drives, we built a custom MACHINES.INI file, which contained a list of all the workstation Ethernet addresses and entries pointing to their respective system environments (see "Sample MSBATCH.INI and MACHINES.INI Files" on page 98).

The installation of the client environment begins with a simple DOS environment, booted from a floppy disk and logged into the NetWare server. In order to embed the drive letter (D:) into the registry for future use, we need to temporarily map that drive letter to the server so that our results from the install don't disappear with the RAM drive when the computer is rebooted. With all the pieces in place, we ran the Windows95 setup utility for the desired client machine, referring to the modified MSBATCH.INF (see "Modified MSBATCH.INF File" on page 98).

After setup's first run-through, a special subdirectory called SUBOOT is created under each client's Windows95 directory; it contains all the files required for the boot image. One file, MSDOS.SYS, is modified so that it contains the proper locations for the boot environment, as shown in "Modified MSDOS.SYS in SUBOOT Directory" at left. The actual image file, called NET$DOS.SYS, is then created by running the RPLIMAGE utility, found in the NETSETUP directory on the Windows95 CD-ROM. The resulting image file must be moved to the SYS:LOGIN directory of the NetWare server so that the client can access it when it's rebooted for the first time.

Upon rebooting, the installation should run to completion and the contents of the workstation's D:\Win95 directory should be compressed into a .ZIP file, which could be reconstituted locally on boot for a fresh environment. We used a .ZIP file because we found that it's a much faster download than numerous smaller files. Additionally, decompressing in a RAM drive is fast.

Since the Windows95 registry contains a lot of information about hardware, we created one image for each physical machine configuration we have in our environment. Another approach would be to create a single image and then import machine-specific information during boot. This latter approach could come in handy if you have special serialized hardware (like audio adapters) that requires unique entries in the registry. In this approach, the basic registry for each machine is merged with the specific components for the audio adapter installed in a particular machine.


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