From the Trenches: Networking (Notworking?) CD-ROMS: Reply...

This is a reply to Jon Knights article on CD-ROMS by r.dawes@unl.ac.uk.

As a Systems Manager I frequently have my expertise and experience sorely tried creating workarounds for installing and configuring networked CD ROMs on diskless workstations.

Here are a few supplementary comments to Jon Knight's article.

At UNL we use two Optinet servers, and a Diskport unit. There are three towers of 8 triple speed SCSI drives attached to each server, and further 8 drive towers will be added to both this summer. The Optinet server software doesn't use DOS interrupts for the SCSI controller cards, therefore all 8 SCSI devices are CD drives. Both servers are 486 DX2, 16Mb Ram, a VL bus motherboard and VL bus (Accten) network card. The Diskport unit has five single speed SCSI drives, these mount directly as netware volumes.

With regard to running applications, a tip I have for diskless PCs is to have a subdirectory on each station's home directory 'map rooted' (netware jargon and there'll be more) to C: (you can only safely do this with a diskless PC), allowing those poorly designed programs that insist on using the root of C: as a spill file space, to run without error. On the next boot up, this directory has it's entire contents flagged purgeable, removed with DELTREE and recreated afresh. In fact all software installed on our diskless stations use this fake C: as the temporary directory, and the process of purging, removing and recreating it prevents the DELETED.SAV file getting overlarge. Incidentally DELTREE.EXE (like HIMEM.SYS) will work with any version of DOS after 3.3.

Another problem that appeared with different applications was bombing out during installation; a cure for this was to have one of the diskless PCs fitted with a none bootable hard disk, obviously a low level test is being made for the hardware. Once installation is complete, the applications worked on any of the diskless PCs.

This is a reply to Jon Knights article on CD-ROMS by r.dawes@unl.ac.uk.

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