DOS boot disks for netware, on IP!

This particular thing has been around for a while, but we hadn't looked at it in a year. Things have changed. There have been IP boot-disks at coolsolutions for a while, so we looked to see if they were more mature.

http://www.veder.com/nwdsk/

Yep. I downloaded this particular one today. It isn't a pre-packaged boot-disk, more of a collection of scripts that generate a boot-disk. You can pick your boot OS, from OpenDOS, FreeDOS, Bart's PE, MS-DOS 6.22, or Win98. It also has a pretty wide selection of NIC drivers as well, which came in handy.

We were looking for a way to image a DL380 with Ghost on an IP-only network. I had to copy the B57.CAB directly to the disk to get the right drivers on, but I was able to run Ghost from our imaging server alright. Very exciting. Lab-imaging was one of our last true IPX dependancies, and now the lab-geeks are going to be trying this disk out. Or so I'm told.

The idea behind the disk is pretty simple. A boot-disk that has memory management built in, and deploys a ramdrive. Then expands the rest of the OS on the ramdrive to finish the boot. This way you can get around the 1.44MB limit of your standard floppy. From the looks of it you might be able to create bootable CD's with this script-set, though I haven't done it yet.