Trying Windows 95 Server Based Setup

[@hyoenmadan]

Windows 95 network boot isn't compatible with TCPIP, because the SNAPSHOT module, which manages the transition from the 16bit network stack to Win95's 32bit stack, isn't compatible with MSClient TCPIP networking component for DOS (NEMM). It is stated in the Readme for the SNAPSHOT applet which is in Win95's SUPPORT directory. The only supported protocols for netbooting/rpling Win95 are NETBEUI and IPX. Microsoft includes an IPX server with NT4 and Windows 2000, and also the NETBEUI layer (which is marked as depracated). This is covered in various sites which talk about the subject. Oddly enough, is possible to netboot Win98 too (and WinME to some extent, manually as netsetup doesn't support it). If you need TCPIP in your netbooted Win95, you need to have an extra network card only for it.

[@Baulder13]

upvoted just because I hope this helps clab!

[@floodo1]

that would explain why it was complaining about not having IPX or NetBIOS installed (-8

[@spongygryphon]

amazing good info thanks

[@user-fh2fm7vr4m]

This post is distilled wizardry

[@matti157]

Nice info! Practically impossible to find, unless you find an old book maybe?

[@charlesdorval394]

I never clicked on a video that quickly.

[@PCGamer1732]

Same

[@alarmingly_good]

Same

[@Deraco1]

same!

[@MNGermann]

YES!

[@MadITGeek]

That statement hit me right in the feels: as a IT sys admin myself: yes, I'm the man in the shadows for sure, but I'm the first person they go to when something breaks....

[@hw2508]

Just mentioned it this week to some people who said, I was the popular person at that moment (because of an failure they had in their system, I was supposed to fix): "That is great for you, but to be the most popular person usually means a lot of work or headache for me."

[@BangBangBang.]

The Windows 95 welcome music- you're up at 2 AM and trying to sneak on dial up Internet. You boot up your grandparent's computer. For some reason they had the volume up, maybe your sister/cousin did it on purpose. But that blasting out at 2 AM, the feeling that you're gonna die while you turn the volume down and a few minutes later your grandpa walking in and telling you to go back to bed

[@TomStorey96]

I'm guessing this isn't a hypothetical situation 🤣

[@artofnoise5013]

What were you doing on the internet at 2am? 🫢😂

[@simarriott524]

I had this exact thing happen to me all the time. Jumping to the speaker volume knob

[@boneappletee6416]

My god, that brings back memories... Except more with Windows 2000 / XP.

[@adampope5107]

Hearing that Windows start up chime makes me feel ten years old again.

[@churchers]

Honestly the best thing about windows 95 was watching the buddy holly video

[@clabretro]

haha true

[@ricardog2165]

Also Siouxsie and The Banshees.

[@looeee]

My University had this configuration. I always wondered how it worked. Thanks

[@clabretro]

very cool!

[@hs_doubbing]

Ahh, I’m sure the serial port IRQ conflict is why networking wasn’t working in my tutorial. Thanks for the explanation there, and thanks for the shoutout! Glad my video was of some use. :)

[@clabretro]

It was very helpful!

[@SwitchingPower]

To have the Win95 machine talk to WIn10/11 you have to enable the insecure SMB1 server support on the newer system. To go the other way you need to enable the SMB1 client support, with that setup you can do file transfer between any windows version like you expect

[@zombie_pigdragon]

I want to emphasize "insecure" SMB1: it's probably fine on a LAN, but in the same way as Windows XP: don't enable it on anything Internet-facing or that you take outside!

[@hyoenmadan]

Actually isn't only that, but SNAPSHOT vxd module, which manages the transition from the 16bit network stack to Win95''s 32bit stack, isn't compatible with with their TCPIP networking client for DOS, and this is why SETMDIR can't find the path. The only suported protocols are NETBEUI and IPX.

[@davidlee9074]

Also needs to enable (vastly insecure) LM password hashing with a group policy setting. Windows 95 doesn't support Kerberos or even NTLM protocols, so it wouldn’t be able to authenticate against Windows Vista or later where LM is disabled by default. With these tweaks I can connect my WfW 3.11 laptop to a file share hosted on Windows Server 2022.

[@aka_bw]

very cool! the joke is, win32/mfc is also now the only stable gui api for linux

[@jeffb2520]

When I was doing computer repair around 2000, we would always joke with each other. With Windows 95: Windows has detected mouse movement; you need to reboot.

[@clabretro]

haha

[@douglydoright5578]

Back when I was doing Novell server upgrades, etc. I ran into a number of sites that had Windows directories for each user on the server. Evidently, they could boot off of a floppy disk and run Windows 3.1 from the server with no hard disk in the PC. I also ran into network cards that allowed booting from the firmware on the network card with all of the DOS files residing on the server.

[@clabretro]

Yeah based on my research this all predates Windows 95! Pretty cool.

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

At that time the ROMs were different depending on which network server you used. I.E. there were ROMs for Novell, and there were ROMs for DEC Pahtworks/PCSA and so on. And of course the ROMs had to fit each network card. Don't know if Microsoft ever made boot ROM images for their servers (LAN Manager on their version of OS/2 and later on Windows NT). Don't think so. Nowadays everything uses PXE. Btw, a suggestion for @clabretro : Maybe dive into the even older things, and try out LAN Manager and whatnot? :)

[@idahofur]

You should see my reply above going one step farther and what happened with office.

[@cda32]

And obviously Netware was the only sane way to remote manage and boot a pile of Windows 95 machines before Active Directory came along. Should definitely do a video on that @clabretro!

[@cda32]

And I say "sane" in the way to mean it was anything but that.

[@Lambykin]

As a networking professional of 34 years, Windows 95 falls directly in my wheelhouse. Pro tip: Make a Win95 folder on C: drive, copy the contents of the CD (or floppies) to this folder & run your setup from that. Biggest advantage - you don't need to worry about the CD or diskettes when you add/remove features. This was common practice for our networking team both in-house & for our clients as CD drives were not standard at the time, and it was not uncommon for a client to order machines without one. The floppy install was painful... Other pro tip: Remember that Windows 95 sits on top of DOS. In order to have "previous command recall" within a DOS window, you need to load DOSKEY from your Autoexec.bat file. Load it into high memory for best results. Reboot the computer after altering autoexec.bat, and you should be able to use your cursor keys to recall previous commands in a DOS window for as long as that window is open.

[@clabretro]

interesting tip about DOSKEY!

[@arjovenzia]

This Guy. both the points I was going to make. manually copying the win95 directory not only makes the install heaps faster, but any other drivers way less annoying. And in the pre FAT32 era, you had to get quite creative with partitions. wasnt a bad idea to have a partition just for win95, a few for your actual data, and one for the OS, you could blow away on a whim and reinstall. it solved alot of problems. like a factory recovery partition, a windows install, the drivers you needed, and your most used applications ready to go, very handy. not so much 95, but I reinstalled 98 more often than I changed my sheets. I now have *nix boxes that have been up for longer than I owned some bits of hardware back then. but if you know it only takes 20 min to reinstall the OS, yeah, just do it, screw you software bugs. DOSKEY is a must. stupid it requires a separate application, but yeah, you'll want that one.

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

Additional tip: Whenever doing anything install related using a hard disk from DOS (or Win9x-DOS), also try to run SMARTDRV. As an example, installing NT4 with SMARTDRV takes 40 minutes on a machine where it takes 3hr without SMARTDRV.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@arjovenzia I honestly still feel having user folders on a separate partition is still the way to go! Not out of sizing necessity, but just to make upgrades/distro switches painless. Especially with the resizeable partition tables we have now, there's basically no downside

[@ssokolow]

@@clabretro ...or just install 4DOS now that it's been released for free so the FreeDOS people can bundle it and have something closer to a UNIX shell in available features and with a much smaller conventional memory footprint. (FreeDOS is a great source for DOS drivers and TSRs that are both more powerful and lighter on conventional memory, such as the freeware'd release of ANSIPLUS... especially if you check all 1.0+ FreeDOS releases so you don't miss stuff that was added and then later removed.)

[@appleontheapex]

I first heard about 'diskless booting' from the Apple keynote from the introduction of Mac OS Server in about 99. They showed off an iMac booted with its hard drive, running right off the G3 server on the bench. Then out rolls a literal wall of 49 more iMac G3s, all booting off the server. I'm still amazed by that to this day! I've recently tried to set this up for myself using a beefy G4 tower and using my many iMac G3s as clients. Never got it working - it's just SO finicky.

[@hw2508]

@@appleontheapex Just saw a video of that keynote a couple of weeks ago. Was that the same keynote they showed the new MacBooks with WiFi?

[@dwDragon88]

Two things. I loved the old Microsoft Press books. They were like huge tombs of knowledge for IT people and tech nerds. Just look at the size of those volumes. I know they still publish books but nothing hits like references from the DOS and Windows 3.1/95 days. We couldn't just google things so the references actually had to be good, and they were marvelous. Second, I love the Windows 95 interface to this day. It's just a little bit crude in all the right places to make you feel like you are not too far abstracted from the actual system. It's easy to just find what you need and do things, compared to the "modern" windows interface where you have to click through multiple layers of poorly designed Metro-style windows to finally get to the actual Control Panel that you need.

[@robertsmith2956]

windows 98 beta ran so fast in vmware you could not log in. you touched a key you got 15 of them, so couldn't type a password. The config settings for speed weren't enabled till after you logged in, which you couldn't do. I'm guessing the floppy part is the old dos network disk. I remember putting two floppies in, and having two command prompts on each formatting the other floppy. That one took a while. But 95 didn't crash. 😅

[@Maulzy23]

This brings back many memories. Living in a flat with other nerds in Amsterdam around '98, trying to get win95 pcs to talk to each other through a linux box with 2 NICs and early broadband via an early cablemodem in bridge mode. Samba servers come to mind, people manipulating the isp to circumvent the download speed restrictions(via arp commands?), shell accounts. Many shenanigans, many error sounds and hair pulling. Much quake. Thanks for this, very cool.

[@webluke]

My friend, who was the IT guy at the school district in 2000, wanted to set up server netboot on all the computers so they would always boot to a good state. I don't know why he never got too far into it; it may have been because a consultant came in and wiped out all his work, getting good computers and selling all new IBM computers, causing him to quit the district.

[@LKComputes]

44:24 ...or because you didn't switch the browsing mode under View > Options > Folder to "Browse folders by using a single window that changes as you open each folder." An option included since 95 RTM. You can even add a navigation bar by clicking View > Toolbar.

[@gtprojects9662]

oh man, the memories of setting up win95, how did we ever do all this before the internet? Pretty sure I had a Tseng Labs video card. Most of the network issues I remember were during lan parties trying to get everyone communicating and the hour you spent just getting everyone connected, then try to figure out what game you were going to play first. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, every time I watch one of your vids I want to go hang out with a beer and talk about the good old days 🤣

[@chrisfairfield1929]

That 95 bootup sounds is soooooooo satisfying

[@oskar6747]

12:15 Imagine doing that when you were 7, spoke only Finnish and Swedish and if you had a change to go online it was all in English. Somehow I managed to learn everything on my own and only broke one motherboard in the process. When I was 9 I was already competent enough that I had the courage to return a 300mark ISDN card to the small pc-shop where the owner told me that if it's still working I have to pay another 300marks for the service. But I had already reinstalled my windows 98 at least five times and was certain that the card had a defect. As it did.

[@donchaput8278]

Brings back a lot of memories from when I was a kid. Don't forget to set your HDD jumper to Master ;)

[@shrdinc]

I worked for AOL in the 90s and all our machines where these remote boot thin clients over a network. Started with 3.11 and then upgraded to 95 over the same disk less boot system. All you data was on a separate mapped share drive.

[@jacobroeland]

There were so many times during this video where I shouted things out. "The drums!" "Wow those checkmarks!" "Yes, the flashlight. And... there's the secret folder!" Windows 95 was also my first machine I used to get onto the internet. And I distinctly remember asking my parents for a Windows 98 upgrade for Christmas one year. I was maybe 7 or 8. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. ❤

[@kaitlyn__L]

So many memories of leaving that flashlight going for 30-45 minutes before the file I needed finally appeared. Hard drives were _slow_ y'all

[@RandomTechWZ]

I love your videos and just the overall excitement (is it really? lol) for the 90s/00s networking and computing. Its so cool to revisit this stuff as someone in their mid 30s and really see what was available when we were kids and just getting started with PCs.

[@ssokolow]

General tip on that DHCP part: Things like the presence/absence of onboard hardware and the state of connected floppy drives aren't always something the BIOS knows how to autodetect so you may need to change them in both the emulator GUI and the BIOS. (I can confirm that's the case with setting the type of connected floppy drives.)

[@BangBangBang.]

Windows All In One (AIO) ISO on Internet Archive released by XiSO has all your retro releases on it (Win9x/ME/NT4/2k/XP) and the 9x releases have CD-ROM support. I've been using this ISO release for 15+ years.

[@squeeeb]

I do miss little things like the music clips windows incorporated into their OS back then. The 95/98 startup themes are so iconic!

[@Spans_]

Oh wow, this is something I never realised was a thing back in the day! Very interesting to see how it works!

[@lcrazy8l]

43:48 As a kid that grew up on Win3.11 then skipped directly to 98SE way way wayyy later - doing this to the start button is actually news to me in 2024. I'm dead, thanks. 😆

[@alexdhall]

Ditto. Suprised this didn't happen on my school's computers. Then again we really didn't have many Win95 computers. We still had the edu of Macintoshes for a couple of years until we got Dell Optiplexes with Windows 98....

[@Teltharion]

Ahh the nostalgia... It was definetly a game changer and i used to love the installation interface, and the drums of course...

[@JoeRichardsWells]

Watching on my sofa and lounge TV, basking in the nostalgia.

[@judewestburner]

Amazing. I was lucky in my early career to set up diskless DOS 6.22 / Windows 3.11 networks using Novell, I never got 95 to work ever

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

I miss that era.. funny this video cam out i was just messing with Windows 95 on my P1 233Mhz last Saturday

[@StonahJonah]

This is really cool I've never used windows 95 but I'm new to IT and this was really entertaining and digestible

[@distinctdipole]

Thanks for another entertaining video. Always good to see the problems along the way. Bonus thanks for pointing me to The Smoking Cap. Looks like another great channel I'm going to enjoy subscribing to.

[@TrolleyMC]

What an awesome video, I hope to see more retro Windows on here. Every now and then I like to make an old Windows NT 4 domain in Virtualbox, I feel your pain about many things, especially Network Neighborhood.

[@charlesdorval394]

Happy birthday DL380 hehehe

[@subynut]

That was very interesting! Somewhere in my stash of old software, I have a Windows 95 upgrade disk. Now I want to look to see if it contains that installer!

[@Deraco1]

haha this is awsome! Ill have to share this with my fellow IT guys. Back in the day (12 years ago) thinking Windows 7 installation from the network was awesome, did NOT know that this was a thing (minus the installation) back in that era! Awesome video sir!

[@li-ao]

Nice talking a deep dive of Windows 95 with you!

[@li-ao]

*taking

[@titop.5228]

Reminds me of a crazy setup they installed in a brand new school in my town way back when. Most classroom computers were thin clients that PXE booted, flashed an Xorg cursor + wallpaper, then magically popped a Win98 domain login. And no admin password set 🤭 Also going to have nightmares about trying to upgrade to IE4 on a machine that shipped with Win95 RTM now. I'll never know why, but we ended up buying Win98 to work around whatever upgrade problem was plaguing us.

[@MNGermann]

I love the icons at the corner showing disk access and etc. My 1st contact with virtualization (or emulator, does not remember) was with "Virtual PC" before MS bought and turn it free, VPC use to have the same icons at the corner. :)

[@Radxd461]

It's cool to see how "advanced" this stuff was back then! Thanks for the videos, keep it up!

[@Username00011000]

Awesome video - really takes me back to stumbling around win95 as a kid. Citrix MetaFrame when? :D

[@AROAH]

You might bring this up later in the video, but this makes me think of the sort of stuff Sun was doing at the time with thin clients.

[@mcpr5971]

Love this sh**t. You've got to do a collab video with Action Retro. You'd get along like peas and carrots.

[@revealingfacts4all]

Network neighborhood was reliant on WINs (analog to DNS). Without WINs, it used broadcast and master browser voting. If you set up your DHCP to hand out a WINs address and configure a WINs server, your network neighborhood will work much better. You could also configure your lmhosts file which, like WINs is to DNS, lmhost is like a hosts file. I was an IT admin in the late 90s running Novell and WindowsNT networks ... the retro stuff is cool, brings back memories

[@wUFr]

at basic school we used to have class with like 10 thin clients, which i think had Win 2000, that loaded each user over network. I remember it took at least 10-15 minutes for everyone to make it to desktop. At least each IT lesson was usually 2x 45mins :D

[@clabretro]

haha

[@Megatog615]

you have to disable the com ports in the bios :)

[@clabretro]

yeah haha. it's been a long time 😆

[@cocusar]

I'm gonna need to do this ASAP and set up a PXE thing as well, God this is cool! I know there were some remote boot stuff (not pxe), but I want a PXE one! Yeah, the video from The Smoking Cap was pretty cool, but it used NT4 and I would like to use 2K as you did. Probably NT4 is the only sane way to go

[@RetroTechChris]

Yea, I think NT 4.0 is probably the easiest way to remote boot Win95. I've got some resources on that as well, including how to add network cards not in the existing configuration.

[@DanielTheRat]

Finally finished the video as i was on a trip great video as alyways. You should make a Discord server!

[@clabretro]

thanks! I do hang out in The Serial Port and Usagi Electric discords!

[@miked4377]

great work clab.....I love this windows revisit is so cool...very interesting....also love the bell systems t shirt!!

[@briangleeson1528]

I love how 2024 virtual Windows 95 is just as "fun" to deal with as real Windows 95!

[@WhitfieldProductionsTV]

we used to do that at the district I now work at, with token ring network we had.

[@lezlienewlands1337]

Dear god the amount of faffing around it took in the Win9x era to get stuff working. Props to any IT department working then!

[@ConfidentialMeerkat]

You dropping a vid on a legacy windows os with the fluff going on right now with the recall is just the best irony that i can think of, prehaps you can also bring up the google page back when it said dont be evil and it will be complete 😉

[@zjorgy5109]

Loved this ! I'll be getting windows 95 running soon

[@tommajor2940]

My favorite set of books was the "Windows NT Server Resource Kit"! That was some cool stuff!

[@MonsieurPi]

It's always a joy and very nostalgic to see you play with these old software and hardware! I was wondering, did you also install IPX and Netbios protocols on the servers?

[@clabretro]

thanks! yeah the protocols were also installed on the Windows 2000 machine.

[@dimitar4y]

Hypnospace Outlaw all up in there; I love this stuff. It was so lightweight and powerful..

[@phatputer]

I forgot that back in the day I did all of this without being able to quickly reference off the internet, just lots of very large Operating System booklets, what a time to be alive.

[@frozendude707]

To get the up key history to work in DOS you need to run the TSR "doskey" first, it is not run by default due to it taking up memory that could prevent other dos applications from running.

[@clabretro]

learned about that after I shot this video haha

[@pretzel1006]

Never seen this before. Didnt know windows 95 server existed.

[@Jerrec]

In Win95 you could update from IE 3 to IE 5. But you missed out Active Desktop. It only was shipped with IE 4.

[@Thesecret101-te1lm]

And also if you have the IE4 install/update as an exe file rather than the full ISO then you might miss out on the Active Desktop update. (IIRC I've read someone mentioning some switches to run the exe file with which would force it to download Active Desktop from Microsoft, but I never tried that as I had the CD).

[@Jerrec]

@@Thesecret101-te1lm true I had a PC Games CD where Active Desktop was included. On some other CD it wasnt, and I was pissed. Because you even couldnt uninstall IE4 then.

[@44Bigs]

Thank you for suffering through this so we don’t have to. This is fascinating stuff!

[@RandonBrown]

Great video. I remeber those resource kit books from the times I was starting on my career. We had those at the office but basically got nothing working and was also too busy installing from cd's for our customers. Also preinstalled / imaged computers like Compaq Deskpros were becoming popular for corporate clients and installs were "too easy". Good old days... Maybe with more experience (I think I was just too young and inexperienced) and ability to search online would have done the trick.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Man. I saw this on Instagram (dial up modem) ... And I knew it was gonna be a video..... Haha... As always great stuff man.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

I work on an DL380 Gen 11/10 during my internship... And gotta say, the newer machines looks sleeker than the compaq gen 1... Haha

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Honestly man, when I saw the title.... I thought some PXE shenanigans is gonna happen. But glad to see this floppy stuff instead lol.

[@galen__]

12:30 -- Looks exactly how I remember, boot order issue too 😅

[@techosarusrex]

Windows Backwards compatibility is so good that my Windows on Arm laptop, runs the Windows XP Pinball game really well :)

[@the_beefy1986]

I did a large portion of a Win95 -> Win98 upgrade over a SMB-shared optical drive since the target system didn't have an optical drive but did have a PCMCIA-based ethernet card (I don't remember exactly, but I suspect 10 Mbit/s).

[@clabretro]

haha I bet that was fun

[@libertine5606]

At the time all I had was the book and 10 - 3 1/2 for the OS. Reading the book got me into files I shouldn't have been in which meant that I had to learn to reformat the 40 megabyte hard drive and reinstall the whole OS. Once I got the modem and could go onto the World Wide Web I did everything I could NOT to mess with the computer! The first "search engine" that I had was a actual yellow pages type book. Most of the addresses didn't even work by the time that the book was printed and I bought it from Fry's. Unless you were a computer scientist your ability to figure networking out by using just a book was almost impossible. I never got into BBSs, other than rec.climbing for climbing, so all this stuff would usually lead you down a path to a dead end.

[@LB4FH]

So cool to see this, had no idea this existed 😁

[@hgbugalou]

I still remember how major ie4 was. It's was like a service pack for windows.

[@spectreofspace]

Did you check the unique network id after switching to IPX for networking? Not sure if the protocol change would have affected that. From my experience trying to run software entirely from the network (using Netware and DOS VMs) results in headaches and a huge amount of respect for the IT admins who did this back in the day.

[@clabretro]

I didn't, I'll check that!

[@OddMan360]

The Windows 95 A Upgrade ISO was likely the retail released CD, whereas the other Windows 95 A ISO would have been an OEM copy. They might have only put the netsetup directory on the retail releases of Windows 95, and the only CD release at retail was the Upgrade version.

[@b3pp0]

If i dont remember wrong you can change so you only have one window open even before you installed IE4 in windows 95

[@clabretro]

I'm 99% sure you're right, I seem to remember that too

[@Tsaukpaetra]

43:05 Does there even exist a SYSTEM.DAT registry file? Looks missing....

[@clabretro]

yeah it's there, I can see it on the share. not sure why it doesn't show up with "dir"

[@GGigabiteM]

If those laptops don't power on, check for suicide batteries. There were quite a few laptops that would have erratic behavior or fail to power on at all with a low/dead CMOS battery. There was a brief period of time when I got dirt cheap "broken" laptops from second hand stores that were quite powerful for the day, and only needed to replace the CMOS battery.

[@dertom545]

Windows installations and Linux Kernel recompiling led me to smoke a lot. Not to mention it was allowed back then.... But what got me all the time was Novell Networking... arggghhhh 3.12

[@WndSks]

You don't need to install IE4 to stop it from opening a new window for each folder. There is a setting in Explorer to reuse existing windows.

[@vinniepie1989]

On Box86 you can enable bios option for nic. It let you to boot from ip

[@RachaelSA]

I have that same book, back in 95 my boss bought each of the techies one, and we read them cover to cover.

[@DIYTechRepairs]

As a kid i did do this for people. Often without proper internet :D Yeah you had your collection of utilities in my backpack. :D

[@dumb5308]

damn, had no clue this was a thing either!

[@colinstu]

I too have wondered that exact question: Why did they pick the drum animation here? I do at least know why the icon is animated: if the machine hangs - at least you'll know because the animation will stop (without having to check with moving your mouse etc).

[@DIYTechRepairs]

I always put the Windows cd on the drive and install from therer. Then you never have to care about the disk. But of course it takes extra diskspace

[@sebastian19745]

At the school we had one lab with one 486DX2 computer that ran Win95 that acted as a server and 12 IBM PS/2 Model 30 (286 computers) wired all in a network with BNC coax cable. The PS/2 computers would boot dos from the 486 computer when that was on and had each one a network share drive on the server. When the 486 was on, the network was working and one PS/2 computer rebooted from a floppy, the network would crash (I did that). When the Win95 computer was off, the PS/2 computers would boot from theirs HDD/floppy and behave like any regular dos computer. I was never able to learn how that network was made and how it worked.

[@richardj163]

You may have to change the order to which drivers are loaded in the registry.

[@louislectric]

Try SMB v1 on the clabbox machine to possibly connect to host.

[@JamesBos]

44:04 tell me you’re in your 40s without telling me you’re in your 40s 😂

[@Cory-Stewart-]

one of my schools had this floppy netboot with 98, had the floppy drives internally mounted so childrens prying fingers didn't take them.

[@WndSks]

The command interpreter might not support up/down arrow but it does support F3 to re-run the previous command...

[@clabretro]

👀

[@n0rbert79]

DOSBOX-X comes with virtual hard drive mode as well and can run Windows '95 and Windows '98 fine... You might want to give those a try.

[@judenihal]

Its great you tried this, however, its important to understand that back in the day Windows wasn't designed for stuff like this. The server boot feature, is very complicated and buggy. I still have my old computer from the 90s, running Windows 95. I have it logging into a Windows 2000 domain, and from there I can share files. From there, its best to be used for what its meant to be used. Games, old software, etc.

[@DanielTheRat]

Finally a new video.

[@eDoc2020]

I knew that Windows 3.x could be network booted, I didn't know that 95 also did.

[@vanderaj]

I ran labs of this stuff. You really should use the Windows client software. You will also need to use NetBEUI, not TCP/IP. Many of the NE2000 cards (clones too) had ROM boot routines that used IPX to load the operating system, so if you have NetBUEI and IPX going on your Windows 2000 box, you might have more luck with less hassles. It was fun to watch the lab. Machines would randomly blue screen as software of the day was fairly unhappy about running without a local disk, and with a locked Windows "disk", which was very common to avoid viruses and students trashing the netboot computers. A quick Ctrl-Alt-Del later, things were back to some form of normal.

[@clabretro]

Definitely wanna try the ROM boot routine as well. And yeah I was probably asking for trouble with TCP/IP ha

[@smileymattj]

The Linksys Tower keeps growing

[@15fakeaccount]

Back on 9x days I didn't know how to do quick format on DOS, so format C:-part on reinstallations took quite long time.