The differences between Waterloo Polaris setups, in an Office or in a Student Lab.

The difference is in the assumptions that are made between the two installs.

The key we use to distinguish between a office machine and a lab machine is the existence of the file C:\polaris\office.dat on an office machine, the file does not exist on a lab machine. Soon we will get all the system administrators to add the appropriate environment variable to the hardware descripter line in station.doc so we can start relying upon the environment variable rather the existence of the file.

Office installs:

• An administrative "Start Menu" group is created, including the shortcuts for Jetform, Netterm and Synchronize. Netterm, Synchronize and TN3270 are also added to the Network group.
• Drive protection is identical under MS Windows 95 in both setups, DOS protection may not be active (at the system administrators discretion). Eventually MS Windows 95 could also be read/write at the system administrators discretion as soon as the driver is modified.
• The D: drive is not touched unless d:\w95\win.com is missing. In this case the backup copy of the machine directory will get copied from the C:\w95 directory to the D:\w95 directory.

Lab installs:

• The administrative "Start Menu" group is not created.
• The D: drive will be erased between users.
• Drive protection is enabled when the computer is started both in DOS and MS Windows 95.
• The D: drive is assumed to be empty unless the same user was just previously logged on. If the user has not changed between logons the only file that will change is D:\w95\system.dat.

The logon copying sequence is:

1. C:\w95\system.dat is copied to D:\w95\system.dat even if the directory does not exist. This is necessary since the autoexec.bat uses the file D:\w95\system.dat to seed the registry. Scandisk is also run on the D: drive to check for errors.
2. during signon the D: drive is erased unless the logon userid has not changed.
3. if the D:\w95\win.com file is missing (i.e. it was just erased) a copy of the machine directory will get copied from C:\w95 to D:\w95. The DOSLFNBK program is used to seed the MS Windows 95 long file names before running MS Windows 95.