Finally, we have enough of the Coda client functioning on Windows 95/98 to
warrant a pre-alpha release. When we say pre-alpha, we really mean
pre-alpha. It has many, many bugs, it will crash, blue-screen, likely lose
data you thought you saved in Coda, and possibly corrupt your registry or
other drives. But if you are adventurous and familiar with Windows driver
development and are already using coda on unix machines, feel free to try
it out. 

For more information on how Coda on Win 95 is implemented, read the
README.win95 in the Coda source distribution.

WHAT WORKS :

We've tested mainly on Win 98, but it used to work on 95 and we haven't
changed anything that would obviously break it. We haven't tried ME yet.

- Windows Explorer can browse Coda
- MS Office 2000 can operate on files in Coda, but _only_ if you have
read/write access. 
- DOS apps can operate on files in Coda
- DOS shell

WHAT DOESN'T :

- Wildcards other than *.* and * in the DOS shell.
- The very first operation on N: must be a 'dir' or a blue screen will
result. This only affects the first DOS shell, in which you must do a 'dir
N:' before you can cd to anything below it. The Explorer doesn't have this
problem as it always does things in the order that works. 
- Case sensitivity issues : Coda is internally case-sensitive, but the
device driver is case-insensitive, as it is expected to be. 
- Name resolution ocassionally fails for unknown reasons. The workaround
is to name the servers in c:\usr\coda\etc\venus.conf by IP address.

WHAT NOT TO DO :

- Try to deploy Coda as your primary Windows network file-system - it is
just not reliable enough yet.
- Use the windows client if you are not already familiar with Coda on
Linux/*BSD/Solaris. This release is very rough around the edges, later
ones will be more more suitable for first-time users 

WHAT TO DO :

- Back up any files you care about.

- Get ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/win95/coda-client-5.3.12.zip 

- Unzip it into C:\

- Create c:\usr\coda\etc\venus.conf, using c:\usr\coda\etc\venus.conf.ex
as an example.

- Add the following to your c:\windows\system.ini under [386Enh] :

device=c:\usr\coda\bin\mmap.vxd
device=c:\usr\coda\bin\vdcache.vxd
device=c:\usr\coda\bin\sock.vxd
device=c:\usr\coda\bin\codadev.vxd

- Reboot

- Run c:\usr\coda\bin\codastart.exe 

- Check the "Init" box to init Venus, it does the the same thing as on
Unix.

- Click on "Start" - Venus should start in a minimized DOS box.

- Click on the "Codacon" tab to view log messages.

- Coda will mounted on N: by default. Enjoy. 



DEBUGGING :

If you can get a short sequence of operations that crashes Venus or one of
the VxDs reliably, you can :

- Get ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/win95/coda-debugvxds-5.3.12.zip 
  These VxDs generate verbose logs in c:\vxd.log & c:\codadev.vxd

- Get FileMon from http://www.sysinternals.com

- Init venus 

- Enable "Monitor Kernel/Venus Messages" in CodaStart.

- Collect the filemon, codacon, kernel/venus messages, and the log files
from the sequence  that causes the crash.


FUTURE WORK :

We intend to continue improving the Windows client, though it will take
considerable time to catch up to the other platforms that Coda runs on.
Most of the difficulties are at the kernel level (vdcache.vxd &
codadev.vxd) - th venus binary is actually compiled from the same source
as on other platforms. If you are experienced in the windows kernel
programming, we'd apreciate any insights you may have regarding the bugs
you are experiencing. 

Thanks,
Shafeeq