Handle more boot time arguments for DOS. Especially initializing network using static IP.
Some body comes with his/her latest laptop, which has a new kind of network adapter. One solution to handle this would be to recreate the CD, with support for this network adapter. This is not good for many reasons.
One solution, would be search for additional driver on a network share. Since, we are talking about network drivers, this is not feasible. What we need to do is to modify our netsetup to search for more reference information and more drivers. So, now netsetup, will check to see if B:\nic.map exists. If so, it appends that file to A:\net\nic.map and copies B:\*.DOS to A:\net. Of course, B: is the physical floppy disk and A: is the emulated floppy disk. Modification to A: are only temporary, since it lives on a ramdisk.
This way, we can give each customer their own floppy disk, which has an additional database and the drivers, or have one floppy which has all the not so common, network drivers.
Allow the kernel and root file system to be located on the network as well. Basically, add an image "netboot", which allows you to boot off the network. This does not require that your network support PXE booting. Typing
netboot boot=nfsserver:/path/to/kernel root=nfsserver:/path/to/root ...will download the kernel from the nfsserver and boot into it, passing the remaining arguments to the kernel, and the kernel inturn will download the root file system. In case of a DOS image, the file referred to by the boot argument, will be floppy image.
Some laptops have PCMCIA network adapters, we need to support them as well. This might just need the right NDIS drivers, but I haven't thought about it yet. Under linux, we need to do more work. Basically, compile additional modules into the kernel and leave the others as modules, and incorporate them into running kernel after we have mounted the CDROM. Once this is done, we can use our own wireless PCMCIA network card for each laptop. So, this means, we dont have to support all kinds of internal network adapters which come with laptops.
If we also have support for mass storage USB devices under Linux, then we backup the hard disk, to the external hard disk instead of a network location. Ofcourse, we can always back it up to a network location, and then boot the OS on the laptop and copy the network file to the external hard disk. But having support for USB devices makes life easier, and allows us to use this CD, when network is not available