paul
Veteran Member
After years of fussing around with external SCSI hard disks to back-up and move data to and from my nearly-stock 5170, I've finally managed to get the AT to recognize my home network and been able to mount (read/write) a shared folder on my daily-use WinXP machine. This will tremendously simplify organizing and archiving the AT's 30 MB hard disk.
Not being an expert on the subject, nor a programmer, the last few days I've been searching for ways to get these machines to talk over a TCP/IP network. Little did I know MS already provide the tools to do this without resorting to any flavor of Windows on the AT, nor compromising my modern PC by adding ancient network protocols.
At the risk of repeating a process already well-established or already covered on this board, I'll describe how to do this:
1. Get the two executable files here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/clients/MSCLIENT/
2. These each expand into a collection of files just over 1.2 MB each when executed. You need to make these available to your DOS PC in the form of either (2) 1.44 MB floppy disks or (2) directories on a local hard disk.
3. Have a supported network adapter ready and waiting on the DOS box, without any packet driver. I used a 3C509.
4. Run setup.exe on disk 1. It finds the network card and installs all the required TSR's. All you need to change during the install is (a) remove the IPX protocol, and (b) add the TCP/IP protocol. It will ask for a local machine name, a user name, and a password. The latter two are used to access the XP shares so need to be a valid account on your XP machine.
When done, it aquires an IP address with DHCP (yah!) and by typing "net" at the command line will allow you to mount a share in the form \\<computer_name>\<share_name> such as \\T3400\COMPUTERS
It installed on my AT under DOS 3.30 but it uses about 160 kB memory so going to DOS 5.0 might be in order to get those into high memory.
It's a blast being able to browse the disk on my XP machine from Xtree. Of course all the long file names are truncated but I can view text files, execute DOS programs, and move stuff back and forth. My next effort will be to get this working on my 2-floppy drive 5150 PC's.
-Paul
Not being an expert on the subject, nor a programmer, the last few days I've been searching for ways to get these machines to talk over a TCP/IP network. Little did I know MS already provide the tools to do this without resorting to any flavor of Windows on the AT, nor compromising my modern PC by adding ancient network protocols.
At the risk of repeating a process already well-established or already covered on this board, I'll describe how to do this:
1. Get the two executable files here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/clients/MSCLIENT/
2. These each expand into a collection of files just over 1.2 MB each when executed. You need to make these available to your DOS PC in the form of either (2) 1.44 MB floppy disks or (2) directories on a local hard disk.
3. Have a supported network adapter ready and waiting on the DOS box, without any packet driver. I used a 3C509.
4. Run setup.exe on disk 1. It finds the network card and installs all the required TSR's. All you need to change during the install is (a) remove the IPX protocol, and (b) add the TCP/IP protocol. It will ask for a local machine name, a user name, and a password. The latter two are used to access the XP shares so need to be a valid account on your XP machine.
When done, it aquires an IP address with DHCP (yah!) and by typing "net" at the command line will allow you to mount a share in the form \\<computer_name>\<share_name> such as \\T3400\COMPUTERS
It installed on my AT under DOS 3.30 but it uses about 160 kB memory so going to DOS 5.0 might be in order to get those into high memory.
It's a blast being able to browse the disk on my XP machine from Xtree. Of course all the long file names are truncated but I can view text files, execute DOS programs, and move stuff back and forth. My next effort will be to get this working on my 2-floppy drive 5150 PC's.
-Paul
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