Dosemu monopolising the network card as well as the hard drive will not be a problem, since the only thing needing those resources would be Ghost itself, which runs under Dosemu. So, as I see it there are no theoretical reasons why this won't work.
I'm going to try this as soon as possible. I'll see if I get the time to do it tomorrow -- and then I'll probably just launch a Knoppix CD or something and see if I can get Dosemu installed under that.
If results of that are favorable, I'm going to try running some different imaging tasks, and network operations, to see if it'll work.
If that in turn works, I'll start investigating the possibility of creating or modifying some form of custom Linux distribution to do what I want.
A few question marks still remain to be straightened though.
First of all, where can I find the DOS side of the packet driver? As I've understood it, there needs to be a EXE on the DOS side containing a packet driver for the particular network card. From the point of view of Ghost, I'll need some sort of packet driver for DOS in order for Ghost to see the emulated network card. Is this a specialized driver that the Dosemu project provides, and/or does Dosemu just emulate some popular network card, allowing me to use one of Ghost's supplied packet drivers?
Second, is there simple way to detect if a BAT file is running under Dosemu? One method that comes to mind would be if the DOS side of the packet driver produces useful return codes if not run under Dosemu. I need to make an ugly hack whereby the same partition is booted twice, once on the bare metal just to run Loadlin on the kernel, and the second time under Dosemu. This is because I don't want to step on how Ghost handles bootable flags and other doodads when invoked over the network. Best not to be looking for more trouble than I'm already in. :-) Suggestions on this point would be nice, but if nothing else, I should be able to pull this off using some hacks whereby control files are created, checked and destroyed -- but better ideas would be appreciated.
-- Per von Zweigbergk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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