Litter of puppies at school -- edupuppy?

[dustypenguin]

I am helping a small mission school in Niger and as such are always on a shoestring budget, so we have been looking at puppy (1.0.5) to extend the life of some of our more elderly machines. Most are AMD K6 300 ish 64MB RAM, dead bios because of soldered in, dead, unreplaceable bios batteries. We have a workaround in place to get them to boot from the floppy. (Thank God for wakepup!!) That we can use them with puppy at all is a small miracle brought about by the genius of many of you. In fact, I am writing this on our first test machines of the batch.

I have a couple of questions regarding their use.

1 -- Puppy sets the host name at boot to puppypc. If running multiple puppies and a DHCP server will this pose a problem (i.e. trying to give multiple IP addresses to the same host name)? Even if that will work, is there a way to change the host name, or remaster the CD to have a different host name at boot? That would be preferable from an administration viewpoint anyway.

2 -- We can get to a pupfile so that we have persistant writeable /root in a rather unconventional method (see below), by using the dialog at boot time asking for the target of the pup file on a USB drive. In that dialog it says you can remaster the CD to reflect the target we use. What is involved in doing that? Is there a HOW-TO explaining that process?

3 - This is how we get the persistant /root. Since the bios is dead puppy can not see the hard drive initially. (How wakepup finds the cdrom under those conditions is amazing!) But when we get to the dialog box asking for a pup on a USB drive (Usually sda1), I was curious how it would react if I put in hda1 and to my amazement it worked, writing the pupfile to hda1. This is NOT a bug, do not fix. This is a feature! And yes, once in puppy, even before that, you could mount, and read / write to hda1 (fat16) even though puppy would not write the pupfile there at boot unless specifically urged to.

Thanks ahead of time for your time and answers!

[dustypenguin]

1 -- Puppy sets the host name at boot to puppypc. If running multiple puppies and a DHCP server will this pose a problem (i.e. trying to give multiple IP addresses to the same host name)? Even if that will work, is there a way to change the host name, or remaster the CD to have a different host name at boot? That would be preferable from an administration viewpoint anyway.

After some more poking around I have found an answer to one of the questions above. In puppy /etc is symlinked to /root/.etc which means most configuration changes recorded in the (normally) /etc configuration files are persistant in the writable pupfile. After the initial installation the /root/.etc/hostname file can be edited to change the host name to whatever is desired.

I hope this helps someone with a similar question.