Re: Symantec Ghost Console Client under Dosemu

[Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru>]

Hello.

pvz@e.kth.se wrote:
> 1) The MAC address of seen by Ghost in DOS needs to be the same as the 
> physical MAC address, and outgoing packets need to have the MAC address of the 
> physical card.
This is possible, although in that mode
dosemu will monopolize your NIC so that
Linux will no longer use it. This also
requires root. The setup for that is simple:
$_pktdriver=(on)
$_vnet=""
$_netdev="eth0"
Though right now the comments in the dosemu.conf
do not suggest $_vnet can be set to "", it only
says about "dosnet" and "tap". This needs to be
fixed to avoid confusion.
Though keep in mind that Ghost under dosemu will
see only the packet interface, not your card. Ghost
supports the packet driver interface, so this should
be not a problem.

> Dosnet, but this should probably be doable.
Forget about dosnet. It is going to be removed.
If you want dosemu to cooperate with your linux
box wrt networking, use TAP. In that case though
the DOS box will have the different (virtual) MAC,
not the real one.

> 2) Ghost will probably need to be able just to access the hard drive 
> directly
As you know, this is no longer supported.

> I can't seem to find if this is possible in current versions in
> the HOWTO, although I seem to have seen indications that this at least 
> used to be possible in earlier versions.
So it was removed. Not really, just disabled in
global.conf, AFAICS. You can easily get it back
with a trivial hack in global.conf (or even
without any hacks at all).
But I don't think it really had to be removed.
People used it on their own risk, it worked for
them, and suddenly it is not any more.
Of course it is horribly unsafe, but not so much
when your drive is not mounted at all, and it was
available only for root, and being root you can
corrupt your drives if you want to. So the removal
probably have to be reconsidered. And if you'll
manage to get the positive results, that will
probably be a good motivation.

> I'd also like to know if any of the components, specifically Dosnet
Forget it.

> direct
> hard disk access is known to be particularilly flaky.
To my own expirience (when it was still there) -
it was not flakey. It was not perfect either (I had
a few progs that worked with partition access, but
not with wholedisk access), but it never, never ever
costed me a single byte of lost info, even though I
tried it with accessing the same space from within
linux at the same time, and other weird things. And
I have not seen any negative comments about it here
either, although probably they took place before I
subscribed. Yet I've seen (rightfull) complains when
it was removed. This all doesn't look right to me.
At least dosemu could check whether the drive is in
use (any partition is mounted), and allow the access
only if it is not. Or explicitly ask the confirmation
for allowing it to corrupt the data...