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Comparison between mTCP's NetDrive and EtherDFS

alejack12001 said:
I am running MSDOS 6.22. I think Modem7 told me that version 6.22 was good to 2-GB which must be FAT16B. Right now I have Debian 12.5.1 on a 64 GB SD card. The properties state the drive is UNIX file system. When you made your 200-MB file in your demonstration video, you were able to store files within the 200-MB file. So, did you have to format the file to FAT or FAT16 to receive the files from the DOS machines. Reason I ask is the EtherDFS required either a partition of FAT or FAT16 to mount and accept files from the DOS machines. I had a USB drive formatted to accept the files from say an XT type machine. It worked except of course for the access denied, which now can be fixed with the DEBUG correction.
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NetDrive has a server mode and a disk image creation mode. If you create a disk image using NetDrive you specify the size and the filesystem (FAT12, FAT16 or FAT16B). NetDrive then produces a formatted image ready to be served to DOS.

See the full documentation here: link
 
I thought that the file you created was the server. So, my plan for now is to create a server file for the files on the first machine and eventually map the different machines within the same file because the files on each machine repeat. For example, DOS doesn't need repeated for each machine, but I have DBase 3 on one machine and Wordperfect 5 on another, as different applications to make the machine unique. Thank you taking the time to present the netdrive features as well as the help to configure the server.. I think this might be informative of other users as well.
 
I'm missing something ...

The disk image filse that you create are on the server, and it is a file that contains a disk image. You have to specify if that disk image is FAT12, FAT16, or FAT16B. Or you can us an existing disk image from another tool. Floppy images are disk images and are included too.

The server program can serve multiple disk images to multiple machines at the same time. And DOS machines can mount multiple images from multiple servers at the same time.
 
I know my next question is off subject. I wanted to know if there is a way to create a small RAM drive on an IBM PC-XT/286 with 1-MB RAM to hold the command.com to allow me to create a setup disk for IBM 5170. Every time I try to copy files to the 1.2-MB floppy drive the system refuses unless I have the 1.2-MB floppy in the A drive. Machine boots from that drive and will not boot from other drives like, IDE, MFM, and/or SCSI hard drives. Motherboard is a clone and not the real IBM 286 motherboard.
 
  • Boot using a disk that has a small ram disk utility in the config.sys.
  • Copy command.com to the ram disk.
  • Set the COMSPEC environment variable to point at the COMMAND.COM in your ram disk.
I do this on low-memory machines to avoid the constant need to swap the DOS diskette back into drive A.
 
Mr Mbbrutman: I have one more question for you. In your second video, you referred to a CALCULON as part of the clients ability to connect with the server. MSDOS 6.22 don't have this command and doesn't know what I am referring to when I trigger the netdrive connect to the server via the port 2002 and the named file disk as will as the assigned drive letter. Where can I find the calculon command so that DOS knows what I am referring to?
 
Calculon is the name of my server, not a command ...

The format for the command is:
Code: 
netdrive connect <machine_name:port> <image_name> <drive_letter>

Run netdrive by itself with no parameters to see the help. Also refer to the documentation for the details.
 
This program is great and really fast as my uploads where done in seconds as opposed to the EtherDFS.

Is there a way to shutdown the server to possibly quit from one image to a different image? For example I have setup an image X; I have populated image X but now I want to use image Y and I want to shutdown image X. I am using a Raspberry Pi 5 for image retention's. Also, Can I see what is inside of the image dsk file?
 
You don't need to shutdown the server for that.
  • The server can serve multiple images at the same time from multiple computers.
  • The client can use multiple images (each on a new drive letter) from multiple servers at the same time.
From the DOS side you can disconnect the image and connect to a new one using the same drive letter, or just setup the device driver to allow more than one drive letter and have multiple connections at the same time.
 
alejack12001 said:
I'll be able to check this out next week. Thank you.
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NetDrive works very well and with the UDP as the protocol the delivery to the server is very fast even with the largest files housed on the vintage machine. Is there a command on the server side that will stop the server without rebooting the machine? My server is running on a Raspberry Pi 5 under Debian 12.4. I have tried kill commands but the server just regenerates under a new process ID. The only thing that seems to work is to reboot the machine to kill the server.
 
Nothing in the server that I wrote will cause that behavior. You can either hit Ctrl-C twice on the window or use the "quit" command, and it should exit gracefully.

How are you running/launching the server?
 
I trigger a script to bring up the server using the "netdrive serve" command. I let the command default to the port specified and the IP of the server with the image file created a head of time. The display doesn't seem to show a Control + C command to stop the server. However, now that you have given me this information on the dual Control + C, I'll try that to bring down the server.
 
I'd like to be able to help here, but I didn't ship a shell script. So the behavior you are seeing is coming from whatever shell script you are using, and not any code that I provide.

On my servers I run the code in a shell script like that so if there is a crash it will restart, but that's not a script I shared. If you are trying to end the server and it gets respawned, fix the thing that is respawning it.
 
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