While this is not a problem with CentOS I am hoping to solve the situation using a CentOS machine. For anyone not interested I am sorry to clutter your mail box. For everyone else any ideas or suggestions are welcome.
A bit of background:
We have an application that runs only in DOS 6.22 at the moment that we would like to run on all of our desktop computers each time they boot up. Our workstations are mostly Windows XP with some Linux.
Our goals:
We would like to be able to have the machines boot into DOS and run the application and then reboot to the normal hard drive. We would like to have it require no user intervention or as little as possible. We would also like to have it only run the app during the first boot up of the day.
Thoughts at the moment:
One idea we have at the moment is to create a PXE server with the DOS boot image on it. (I have done that before using Windows RIS but we are trying to avoid a windows Server as RIS is a bit of a pain and it prefers user interaction. It also would not fit well with our solution to have it only run once a day.) We could then run the application and inside the DOS image we could have it reboot the machine. We could then set the client machines to boot PXE as their first boot option. The next thought was to somehow watch the connections to the tftp server where the boot image will be kept and watch for the client IP then have the PXE server create a new firewall rule that would block access from that client to tftp. The thought there is that once the client has downloaded the boot image once it will run it and then on reboot will not be able to find the boot image and, I think, would fail at the pxe boot and move on to the next item in the boot list. Then every midnight the list of blocked IPs would be cleared and we start the process over again.
So any suggestions on the best way to take a bootable DOS disk and turn it into an image that a Linux based PXE server can serve, ways to monitor the tftp connections and then add them to the firewall after they have finished downloading the boot image, and any ideas on any better ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Rob