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EtherDFS - an ethernet drive for DOS

keenerb said:
I verified it IS still working for me; I had upgraded my raspberry pi 3 in my little mac portable system to a 4. I'm using the :: c-d syntax, it just works fine.

View attachment 61351

Are you sure your server and client version match?
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Sorry for going away a bit from the original topic, but I see that you run a virtual floppy?
Is it something like; https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/wikis/SerialDrives.wiki
Pls point me in a good direction for a floppy emulator, so then I maybe do not need to reuse the few old 5.25" floppy disks I have left for just creating install / boot disks...

I'm kind of starting to rediscover these old computers and it seems a lot of convenient things been added since... :)
And I see that Trixter is writing in this tread, I must take the opportunity (even if only seen on you tube as I have no 8088 machine) - your demos are incredible!
I did a part of the "coding" for Pinball Fantasies (and Illusions) PC version back in the 1990s, but since then I have done other things and almost not touched any old computer... Though, I saved some stuff from back then, that now come up to the surface during some basement cleaning. Sadly I did throw away some CRTs, IBM computers and stuff that I really would like to have now, but it is 20 or more years ago... Anyway. I will set the machines on a physical network tonight to see if this fixes my problem, thanks for all good advises! :)
 
JohanLu said:
Sorry for going away a bit from the original topic, but I see that you run a virtual floppy?
Is it something like; https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/wikis/SerialDrives.wiki
Pls point me in a good direction for a floppy emulator, so then I maybe do not need to reuse the few old 5.25" floppy disks I have left for just creating install / boot disks...

I'm kind of starting to rediscover these old computers and it seems a lot of convenient things been added since... :)
And I see that Trixter is writing in this tread, I must take the opportunity (even if only seen on you tube as I have no 8088 machine) - your demos are incredible!
I did a part of the "coding" for Pinball Fantasies (and Illusions) PC version back in the 1990s, but since then I have done other things and almost not touched any old computer... Though, I saved some stuff from back then, that now come up to the surface during some basement cleaning. Sadly I did throw away some CRTs, IBM computers and stuff that I really would like to have now, but it is 20 or more years ago... Anyway. I will set the machines on a physical network tonight to see if this fixes my problem, thanks for all good advises! :)
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I am actually using "ethflop", which is written by the same person who wrote "etherdfs". It replaces an existing floppy drive with a network-mounted floppy image, but you can't use it for booting sadly. A Gotek/HXC device is your best bet for a replacement virtual floppy drive imo.

http://ethflop.sourceforge.net/

It supports a massive 31mb virtual floppy drive, even on my Tandy 1000 with 720kb drives! The access time isn't great, it's still slow, but it's hugely convenient.
 
keenerb said:
I am actually using "ethflop", which is written by the same person who wrote "etherdfs". It replaces an existing floppy drive with a network-mounted floppy image, but you can't use it for booting sadly. A Gotek/HXC device is your best bet for a replacement virtual floppy drive imo.

http://ethflop.sourceforge.net/

It supports a massive 31mb virtual floppy drive, even on my Tandy 1000 with 720kb drives! The access time isn't great, it's still slow, but it's hugely convenient.
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Thanks, I will check it out... when I got etherdfs working... Now on the same physical network, still not working... The MAC autodetect have never worked ether... I'm starting to think my router may not like what is sent, can it be some kind of firewall preventing this? Perhaps I shoud make a new small network from scratch...
 
I use a local raspberry pi on a dumb hub for my etherdfs/ethflop setup. I've not had a lot of luck with routers and wifi and whatnot passing the raw packets the ethertools use...
 
Great Hierophant said:
Looks promising, but as long as the server is Linux-only, I am afraid the audience will be extremely small. If he put up a DOS server program (working through DOSBox perhaps), I bet it will get more attention.
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You might be surprised. Even if you are trapped in the ever shrinking Microsoft world, there are innumerable cheap single board Linux computers that you could use as a server for less than $75.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I found an "installable from a directory" distribution of Caldara DOS 7.0.3 and went ahead and installed that over 6.0. Took nearly two hours start to finish but it did complete...

And EtherDFS does work under it. So, yeah, DR-DOS 6 problem.
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Probably a little late for you but DR-DOS before v6 (with the march 1993 update) has incompatible internal structures (CDS etc) that means all redirectors that expect to create drives as if they were PC/MS-DOS v4+ will have problems. I've had limited success mapping DR-DOS 5 and original 6 using those different structures on a custom redirector and v3.4x doesn't seem to be possible at all. So for normal redirectors it's best to use the v6 March 1993 update or as you've found v7 and up.
 
bob22 said:
Probably a little late for you but DR-DOS before v6 (with the march 1993 update) has incompatible internal structures (CDS etc) that means all redirectors that expect to create drives as if they were PC/MS-DOS v4+ will have problems.
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Yeah, I don't know if i'm inclined to roll back considering I was having some other issues with v6, but that is interesting to know that there were such major behind the curtain changes inside a single "version". (This is one of the complications I've been noticing with DR-DOS, there are a *lot* of different variations of it.)

One sticking point I have with seven is, so far as I can tell, the equivalent configuration (it's not identical because they changed out HIDOS.SYS for HIMEM.SYS and got rid of the on-the-memory-manager switch to tell it to load high, instead switching to an MS-DOS like "DOS=HIGH" syntax) gives me almost 10k less base memory than six did, and I'm not clear why, other than it looks like 7 isn't loading some of the data structures into upper memory that 6 did. Documentation for optimizing DR-DOS's memory usage is scarce (or at least hard to find) compared to MS-DOS, especially for weird edge cases like an XT with upper memory blocks.
 
If you do decide to go back to v6, you'll need to search for the update which is called MAR_UPD.ZIP. After which your NFS and other redirectors should work fine.
 
I did try to set up a local router with factory settings without success. I am really out of ideas how to make EtherDFS work, is there any way to test that the communication works? The strange thing is that the first tries, it (at least I think so) managed to create a 0 byte size file from the DOS client to the Linux-disk, but it cant autodetect the MAC adress, and nothing seem to work. Is there any other way to test that the prococol it relies on is "open" and not filtered by the router or linux os? What I think, is there is some problem on the linux side, as the other things I tested did not have any effect at all...
 
Just because I said so, I got it up and running. Finally! It must have been the network that was playing me a trick... :p
 
JohanLu said:
I did try to set up a local router with factory settings without success. I am really out of ideas how to make EtherDFS work, is there any way to test that the communication works? The strange thing is that the first tries, it (at least I think so) managed to create a 0 byte size file from the DOS client to the Linux-disk, but it cant autodetect the MAC adress, and nothing seem to work. Is there any other way to test that the prococol it relies on is "open" and not filtered by the router or linux os? What I think, is there is some problem on the linux side, as the other things I tested did not have any effect at all...
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So you have a firewall enabled on the Linux server? That could possibly be blocking up the works.

If you have tcpdump installed on the Linux box you can try running "tcpdump" and see if the server is responding to the client. This is complicated by the fact that etherdfs uses raw packets, not TCP/IP, but this works:

tcpdump -i (your ethernet device) not ip and not ip6 and not arp

pretty effectively. The communication is really minimal; when you do the initial "etherdfs :: C-E" you should see a single packet with the source your PC's MAC address and the destination ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff; the server should reply with a single packet. That's all I see, anyway. Subsequent file operations should produce a spew of packets with the PC's and server's MACs alternating as source and destination; I haven't analyzed it in great detail but it looks like every packet sent by one side gets a matching single packet ack, so if you see a string of packets going one direction with no response I would *guess* that points to a problem.
 
I just came across this - really fantastic and I am looking forward to trying it out on my XT! What a great example of cooperation between everyone - thanks to Mateusz especially.
 
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