I've recently gotten a contract with a "rent to own" company in the city. I will be verifying computer hardware and installing the operating system (Win9x) on all of the computers that they deal with.
My goal is to write an installation floppy that will handle the entire installation process. The floppy will be responsible to boot the computers into real-mode (MS-DOS) and connect to my Linux host via serial ports. On my Linux host I will have a "master image" of the operating system CD and a Windows installation script. Once connected the computers will access an installation script that will start an automated Windows installation over the serial cables This will enable me to start multiple OS installations at once and periodically check on them all. Why go with serial cable? Because most of the computers will not be equiped with ethernet cards. I have though about purchasing Norton Ghost, but I will be dealing with multiple version of the Windows operating system as well as several different hardware configurations. I already made a few serial cables using low capacitance cable and a few db9 and db25 connectors along with a few gender changers. I plan to get an old 10Mbps ISA NIC that runs under Linux and plug it into my hub, I then can use a few ethernet -> serial adapters and have up too 4 computers (4 ports on the HUB) running through the installation process at once!!! The best part is, I can configure my Linux host to masquerade the internet to the computers. With that I can run Windows update and install the apropriate drivers for the hardware too. This idea of mine sounds great but I'm not sure if it will work. For example, to connect to the Linux host via the serial ports I will need some sort of serial network driver for MS-DOS, where do I find it? And, what type of service will I need on my Linux hosts in order for the DOS clients to mount network shares? Will I be able to configure the DOS clients for TCP/IP networking? Thanks in advance Stef
