Halo Club Members,
I am a new ilug-cal member and this is my first scribbling. The site
looks great but more penguins should join in to make it greater. I
would like to know how can I contribute to this honest effort.
I have attached a file setup.txt which is about a
problem we faced in our lab.I haven't prevoiusly scribbled so I hope
that other club members will be a bit considerate.
The most common question that Penguins face while flipping their
flippers is that : "Do you think Linux is a competitor of the software
giant Windows ?" Now let us be polished sober Penguins.Had we not had
enough of competition ? Linux doesn't shoo away
other Operating Systems. Instead, it says : "Come
co-exist with me." Here is a problem faced in our LAN. The problem was
related to the scarcity of resources with the installation of Windows
in a
client machine and how Linux became the savior in that situation. I
hope that it will make a resourceful reading for the club members.
-- keep smiling.........
A new member.
__________________________________________________
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In a networked LAN the scarcity of resources is a boon since it makes
you realize the potentialities of different Operating Systems.
Here is the situation :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The server :
~~~~~~~~~~~
The server runs on Linux 5.2. Has a shared CDROM drive. It runs
all the required daemons required for networking and resource sharing.
I'll skip other technicalities and stick to only those required
for our discussion. The server runs SMB (The Samba for Linux)
and hence specific UNIX file-systems can be accessed from clients
which are running on Windows 95.
The client :
~~~~~~~~~~
The client runs on Windows 98. The boot sequence is A,C.
No CDROM drive available.
* That's where resource sharing pops in. *
The client can also be booted from a Linux Net Boot floppy which has
the boot image in it. Without the boot floppy it would boot from the
hard-disk in Windows 95. When booting in Windows 95, the client
gets the IP from the server running DHCP and other UNIX file systems
get mapped using the SMB. When booted from the floppy as a client
running Linux, it can access the specific file systems in UNIX
using NFS ( Not the car-game "Need For Speed" but "Networked File
System").
The Problem :
~~~~~~~~~~~
An energetic & enthusiastic First Year student formats the hard disk.
With no Windows all network services from Windows vanished. Now the
client can only be booted from Linux with the NFS.
Now you have to install Windows 95 in the client keeping the
following things in mind.
1. You have got the Windows Installation CDROM but no CDROM drive in
the client.
2. You cannot go on installing Windows from the 25 odd floppies you
had kept aside for installation as it would take a lot of time.
3. You just have a Windows startup floppy.
4. Windows has gone totally. Thus there are no questions of accessing
the shared CDROM from Windows.
The Solution :
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Tux comes flipping its flippers. Since the client boots from Linux
and has NFS, thus the CDROM can also be made a part of NFS. Thus we
will be able to access the CDROM from Linux.(simply by mounting it
on any file system). Again, the partition of the hard-disk which has
been set to active can also be mounted as the file-system for the
active partition is generally /dev/hda1.
But you cannot run the most common and known
"setup" program for installing Windows on the hard-disk
from the shell, eh ? So what do we do ? To make matters
simpler here is a Case Study.
The Case Study :
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Client : IP : 192.168.10.24 : Netmask : 255.255.255.0
Server : IP : 192.168.10.10 : NetMask : 255.255.255.0
Tasks done :
~~~~~~~~~~
1. The client was booted from a Windows startup floppy.
2. fdisk was run and all partitions were deleted.
3. fdisk was again run and partitions were created.
4. Set the active partition to C:\.
5. The created partitions were formatted.
6. The client was booted with the Linux Net Boot floppy.
7. Log on as root .
8. Make two directories hd and hd1.
-- mkdir hd
-- mkdir hd1
9. Mount the CDROM (of server) in hd. : mount server:/mnt/cdrom ./hd
-- The IP or the HOSTNAME of the server both can be used.
In our case, the name of the server was "arun" with IP
address 192.168.10.10. So the command was -
mount arun:/mnt/cdrom ./hd
10. Mount the harddisk in hd1 : mount /dev/hda1 ./hd1
-- The hard-disk refers to the local harddisk of the client..
Now both the harddisk of the client /dev/hda1 and the CDROM of the
server /mnt/cdrom are mounted on the file-systems hd1 and hd
respectively. Now we simply need to copy files between these two
file systems one of them being a NFS.
11. Copy files : cp -ar ./hd/win95/ ./hd1
The files needed for installing Windows are copied to the
active partition of the hard disk.
12. Everyting done... logout...ctrl+alt+del....
13. Boot the computer with the Windows startup disk.
13. Change to the WIN95 directory and then run the setup program.
A:\
A:\C:
C:\cd win95
C:\WIN95\setup
Now go on with the Installation process.
So, Linux actually helped in installation of Windows. How's that ?
