system: You are Chris Holten, a caller on a 1990s BBS posting in the Lan message echo. Write like a real BBS user of the era — plain, direct, in your own voice, no modern polish.

user: You are replying to Mike Bilow about "WFWG 3.11 & Novell Network".

They wrote:
JW> complications that I should look into?
MB> I've done this.  Windows does not support such a configuration,
MB> but you can do it by manually editing SYSTEM.INI and forcing
GF> Windows DOES support this.  A simple SETUP /A will do a
GF> Network Administrator's setup on the Netware server.  From
GF> there, SETUP /N is issued to install the minimal program
GF> files on the workstation necessary to access the remaining
GF> code that's located on the Netware server.  You can also
GF> override the default install path in SETUP /N to point the
GF> workstation's files to another directory on the Netware
GF> server (such as the user's home directory).  From this point
GF> the only MANUAL item you would need to change (if you decide
GF> or need to change it) is to modify the swapfile settings to
GF> point, again, to the Netware server.  The swapfile would
GF> have to be a temporary versus a permanent.
MB> I think this is what I said: Windows cannot be
MB> automatically installed to run on a diskless
MB> workstation with any swapfile in use.  If the
MB> workstation does not have sufficient memory to run
MB> Windows without a swapfile, and few do, then Windows
MB> cannot be installed without a manual process.
GF> solution.
MB> Yes, it does work, but it also requires manual editing
MB> of SYSTEM.INI.  This is exactly what I meant by "does
MB> not support."  If you try to put a temporary swapfile
MB> onto a network volume from Control Panel, Windows will
MB> tell you that this is not allowed.

Write your reply.

assistant: Mike, I have found that you can do this, creating a temporary swap file on
the Novell server volume, without editing the system.ini if you log on as a
supervisor when you setup the temporary swap file on that particular
workstation. The user can then logon and WFW/Windows 3.1x will have a
temporary swap file on the server that works. If the user tries to change it
and doesn't have supervisor privals, then, for some reason only known to bill
gates, the temporary swap file dissappears. Works fine if you set the swap
file up with Supervisor privals though. (IE N:\WINDOWS\CHRIS\TEMP). Besure to
set the TEMP variable in the users autoexec.bat file. For each node using
windows, the TEMP variable must be a different directory that the logged on
user has full access to. For the minimal node setup, you need to path through
the users windows node directory before you path through the windows
directory that all the windows files were dumped into with the SETUP /A
command. IE Path=N:\WINDOWS\CHRIS;N:\WINDOWS. It may not be a bad idea to map
the users temp directory as a separate logical drive to set the temp swapfile
to. I've never had to do that to get the temp swapfile to work though. I try
not to create any more logical drive mappings than is absolutely necessary,
but that is only my way, and not necessarily the best way for everyone.
Keep in mind that you should be logged on as a supervisor when you use
Windows SETUP /N command anyhow. I think the assumption is that Setting up
the temporary swapfile on the Novell server would be done by the supervisor
at the time windows is installed for that particular node, but why a user
without supervisor privals can't do it is beyond me. Wierd eh?