Netbooting DOS 7+ with pxelinux

It turns out that there is a great DOS boot floppy that has just about every network driver included in it available online at http://www.netbootdisk.com/.  The author has a note there that claims XP-based DOS floppies won’t boot over PXE.

YES THEY WILL.  You just have to use the RAW option in the memdisk kernel options of the config file for PXELinux.  You can read about the option at http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK.  If my memory serves me right, BIGRAW works as well.  It’s also on the Syslinux Wiki.  It’s also possible with a floppy emulation utility (like ImDisk available at http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html) to make 2.88 MB floppy images to “get around” the problem of boot floppies being too large to fit the NetBootDisk contents.

Here’s an example of the RAW Memdisk option used in a pxelinux config file:

LABEL A
MENU LABEL ^NetBootDisk
KERNEL MEMDISK
APPEND tftp-path/to/floppyimage.288 RAW

Playing with Faronics Deep Freeze pt 2

Well, here’s another piece of info about Deep Freeze that might be helpful to scripters out there:

The registry contains the current status and version of Deep Freeze.  It’s located at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Faronics\Deep Freeze 6\DF Status

This is a string value that can be one of the following: Thawed, Frozen, Maintenance Mode, Thawed Locked, or Seed.  It’s possible that Frozen Locked is also a valid state, but I haven’t seen that one personally.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Faronics\Deep Freeze 6\Version

This is obviously a string value that represents the version.

As far as I know, this only works on 6.3 or later Deep Freeze.  My experience is only with the enterprise editon, but I think this should work any edition.

Playing with Faronics Deep Freeze pt 1

Hello all, and I’m back.  If only I were better than ever.

I guess this post could also be titled “making software do things the manufacturer didn’t intend”, but here goes:

The thawspace of Deep Freeze can be accessed (offline) with ImDisk (free, available here) and WinImage.  And of course with Linux (loopback device, lookup the man page for losetup).  We recently had a situation at my employer where the existing thaw space was no longer big enough, and critical system files (user profiles) were stored on it, so I researched how to create a new one – and it is fairly easy with those above tools.  Turns out the driver for the thawspace, named ThwSpace.sys, has some parameters in the registry at:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ThwSpace\Parameters\

In this path, you’ll see a key for the drive where the image file is located (ususally C:), and a sub-key for the drive letter the thawspace is mounted on.  Under the sub-key, the default value will indicate how big the image/thawspace is supposed to be in megabytes, and there will be another binary value that I honestly don’t have a clue what the data in represents.  The name of the binary value will be the name of the actual image file used for the thawspace.

What’s cool is you can thaw deep freeze out, setup a disk image with ImDisk, and change the registry values for the ThwSpace service to point to your disk image, and voila you have a custom thawspace.  I highly recommend that you follow their naming convention for the thawspace image, though – usually it’s at C:\$Persis0.dsk or C:\Persis0.dsk depending on what version of Deep Freeze installed the thawspace to begin with.  I just added a new image, and ended the file name with a 1 instead of a 0.

What I did to solve our little situation was to create a new, bigger image with ImDisk, use xcopy to copy all the files with permissions intact, and change the registry to reflect the size and file location of the bigger disk image.  On the next reboot, the Thawspace driver mounts the new disk image instead of the old, and you can erase the old one.

More cool freeware

Trying to share with you guys as I find this stuff.  Haven’t tried these yet, but they look promising:

inSSIDer – Wireless scanner, replacement to NetStumbler – http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider

RDTabs – Tabbed remote desktop client -  http://www.avianwaves.com/Tech/Tools/RDTabs/

Terminals – Tabbed VNC/RDP/Telnet/SSH client – http://www.codeplex.com/Terminals

Have fun out there!

Great list of freeware

Hey, just stumbled accross a great list of freeware/free for personal use softwares for the Windows environment.  I know it’s good because it has quite a few of my favorite tools on there.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

Where’s the PXE server?

Ahhh, sometimes it’s good to know the difference between DE-FACTO and DE-JURE standards.

DE-FACTO means “by default”, and it’s likely that everyone does it this way.  Some examples: HP JetDirect (raw tcp port 9100) printing is a de-facto standard of network printing.  Common and popular because it works across many computing platforms and it’s simple — so much so that companies have mimicked it.

DE-JURE means “by law”, and this commonly refers to more clearly defined standards that are controlled by a governing body.  Like HTTP, FTP are controlled by the IETF.

When these two ideas bump together, boy can it be interesting.  Anybody who has done a little research at the IETF site for details on how to PXE boot a PC can tell you it looks like an involved process that requires DHCP, BOOTP, and TFTP (see pxe.ca or Wikipedia for what I’m talking about).  Seems like more work than it’s worth.

BUT, LOW AND BEHOLD, Intel, one of the originators of PXE and WfM, and the largest source of firmware for onboard network cards in corporate/business PC systems, decides that all this is complicated, and they make new firmware capable of booting with merely two options setup on the DHCP server and a TFTP server to host the bootstrap image.  BUT THEY DON’T TELL A SOUL ABOUT IT.  Luckily for me and you, someone figures this out and posts it out there for everyone to see.  This person happens to be H. Peter Anvin, working on the PXELINUX project.  You can see the details I’m talking about at the FAQ page of PXELINUX at zytor.com.  It basically amounts to:  For a long time now, Intel’s boot firmwares have not required proxy DHCP or BOOTP.  Just set DHCP options 66 and 67 (next-server and filename) to point to your TFTP server, and the bootstrap image you intend to use, and everything works fine.

I hope I don’t look like the type of person who likes to do long division on paper, when a calculator is right next to me.

Frustrating sometimes, really, how a DE-JURE standard can combine with DE-FACTO standard.

GUI for ImageX

There’s a nice front end GUI for ImageX.exe (the file-based imaging tool Microsoft uses to install Vista, but can be used to make images of any NTFS system).  It’s available at:

http://www.autoitscript.com/gimagex/

Of course, you need the WAIK (Windows Automated Install Kit) to use it.  Too bad that’s 1 GB in size.  The latest version (1.1) is available at microsoft.com downloads.

I take too long…

Yes, it’s been 14 days since my last post.  What can I say, I take too long.  Hopefully I’m worth the wait.

I’m currently in an SQL class, it follows the curriculum for 2780b, titled “Maintaining a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database”.  Not exactly my cup of tea, but I won’t turn training down. It’s kind of odd to take a class in the middle of another class (the Vista one I mentioned has been interrupted by this SQL one).  It appears that SQL 2005 has come a long way from 2000.  I had a very brief class on Transact-SQL which is/was based on 2000.  As I write this, SQL 2008 has been released last month (June 2008).  I can’t help but wonder if they have improved on the “Studio” style interface they introduced in 2005.

and it begins

Well, my first post. I’m currently in a training class on Windows Vista, which I personally have been slow to adopt. So far I’ve enjoyed it, I think mostly because of the instructor’s broad knowledge. That and he doesn’t have a bias towards or against MS.

It’s not that I dislike Vista, it just seems (like a lot of software lately) to be, well, half-baked. Some of the ideas and implementations of those ideas are great, and I like them.  Other ideas are great, and the implementations aren’t so hot.  On the whole, it’s an OK product.  I’m neutral towards it as an OS.  More specifically, nothing about it excites me.  I guess you could say that in the 10 years or so I’ve used Microsoft’s operating systems, the sensation of a treadmill has come over me.

On the other hand, I do get exited when I toy around with Linux or open-source software.  I’m no Linux fan-boy, so don’t worry about that.  But more about that later.