DOS/Win3x SMB Speed

[Raven]

I'm backing up all the data on my Presario 425, then I'm going to set it up with a far bigger HDD. It came with ~400MB, I upgraded it to 4.5GB and that turned out to be far too little for my insane loading of games en masse, so now I want to stick a ~30GB disk in there.

Anyway, since mTCP FTP doesn't do subdirectory traversal, I am using Win3x SMB to transfer my data over - I made a share on the Win311FW 486 (133mhz Evergreen 586, 20MB RAM) and then connected via my desktop running Win7-64. The copy is going at ~75KB/s. The machine gets upward of 700KB/s easily running mTCP or Arachne. I can only assume that it's Win3x to blame - is this correct? Is there any way to work with SMB from DOS or Win3x without whatever is causing this major lack of speed? I've never gotten the MS LAN Client for DOS to work, so I don't know how fast that works.

Anything that gets suggested should either use the internal Win3x networking, or a packet driver (or be able to be made to work with one, i.e. shims).

Also, if you can think of something that isn't SMB that could get this job done, let me know, but SMB would be the best for convenience.

Thanks!

 

[sbrown]

I'm probably very wrong about this, but SMB/CIFS servers on Windows after Win98 or NT4 use encrypted passwords. Since it sounds like you're using the NT box as the client I'm assuming it's falling back to the the older SMB & LANMAN code and doing a bad job of it.

One alternative would be to set the NT box to use plaintext passwords. AFAI can see, it's either settable via the Administrative Tools - Local Security Policy - Security Settings - Local Policies - Security Options - Microsoft network client: Send unencrypted passwords to connect to third-party SMB servers (whew!) or the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkStation\parameters and set "EnablePlainTextPassword"=dword:00000001

I'm surprised it connects in the first place, but if the encryption schemes (or lack thereof) match then I'd expect the best possible speed.

 

[brad162]

Go into Add/Remove Programs, then Windows Componets, then uncheck "Remote Differential Compression"

It causes problems using SMB with anything older than Vista since Vista was the first OS to support it. If you disable it, you should see a speedup in LAN transfers in general between all of your machines. I disabled it in mine and my Vista-Mac transfers went from ~120KB/sec to ~10MBps.. it makes a huge difference when it's off.

On a side note, on my W311 machine (486DX4-100) i normally get ~1Mbps transfer rate, so you should definately be able to achieve that, as long as you have 32-bit file and disk access enabled so it's not hogging the processor.

 

[Raven]

I'm going to try this right now - will report on changes.

Once upon a time I set up my Win7 box as a server and got WFW311 to successfully connect and map drives and everything - I believe I had to create an account with no password, then enable the ability to log in without a password over the network via group policy, to get that to work. The thing that WFW311 does differently (or rather, "outdatedly") is the password algorithm - encryption or transmission or what-have-you (I'm not sure what stage is different) - so without a password the username login part of the process goes fine.

Edit: By "this" I meant the registry tweak. Will try both methods and report on if either (or both) helps.

 

[brad162]

you should be able to disable password protected sharing like in vista, that's what i did, or what i always do if that doesnt work is just drop whatever the other machine needs in the public folder since windows will share that without a password to guests.

now it's funny, it was a lot easier to get my mac to talk to the win311 machine than it was vista, although if i have a filename that's longer than the 8.3 format in the network drive i have mapped to my mac, i just dont see the file, so i have to rename everything that i put in my w31 shared folder, but on my vista machine i can see them just like you'd see a long file name in DOS.. weird.

 

[Raven]

It seems that once the folder has been cached into memory on the 486 the transfers triple in speed - the backup the other day was 4.5GB of data, so this wasn't possible then. Anyway the first transfer went like crap - I tried again, and it went 150-180KB/s. I then turned the option back off and it still went 150-180KB/s, so I can safely say that that registry tweak does nothing for this situation.

I will now try killing RDC.

Edit: I know this doesn't make any sense from a logical standpoint, but getting rid of RDC hurt the speeds a bit. It now goes from 110-170KB/s.

I think the problem (or at least the main problem) is my HDD overlay. Unfortunately I don't think I can ditch that as I'm about to UPGRADE the HDD due to lack of space from a 4.5GB..

 

[brad162]

Do you have 32-bit disk and file access on? that can make a huge difference. The RDC turnoff is what fixed my entire network. I have an iMac (the gf uses), my MacBook Pro (Dual boots Vista Ultimate x64), my 486 with 3.1, and sometimes use my p1 HP with NT 4.0

Ever since turning off RDC all of the machines got substantually higher transfer rates..