We have concocted a boot disk which will run up a DOS Client 32 session over IP or IPX. It also has drivers for six different NIC types. Ideal for mixed protocol sites with the usual mish mash of hardware.

Once run up it presents the user with a menu of servers to connect to and operations to perform. We basically use it to "Ghost" PCs to and from servers. If you are using IP, you will want to look at these:

- Write performance on IP-based NCP connection slower than using IPX-based - TID10061307

- TCP Delayed Acknowledgement Explanation - TID10068360

After setting this parameter to OFF (note it is "TCP DELAYED ACK" in NW4.x) Ghost writes to the server are significantly faster. On a 10Mb half duplex connection, uploads went from 6MBs-1 to 80MBs-1 which is comparable to an IPX connection. This parameter is only useful over slow eg dial up links and really ought to be defaulted to OFF.

The whole thing is pretty extensible and easy to configure, simply needing some site specific changes.

The attached includes an image (IMG) file and a copy of rawwritewin to write it to a floppy (a cool tool written by John Newbigin. There's a readme.txt in the root of the disk which lists what changes are needed.

Authors:

Jon Gerdes

Steve Willis