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mTCP 2010-10-20 Version

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mbbrutman

Associate Cat Herder
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Hi,

Once again, a new version of mTCP is available at http://www.brutman.com/mTCP .

On the surface this version looks like the prior versions. The biggest visible change is that FTP now has command line editing and recall, which makes it much nicer to use.

Deeper down in the TCP/IP stack the changes were pretty significant. This is the first version to support IP fragment reassembly. I have been able to get by without it for the last two years but really to be a compliant TCP/IP stack it should support sending and receiving IP fragments. This change will improve the compatibility with other networks and gateways. I was able to get IP fragmentation support in with minimal performance impact; you'll only notice it if you get fragmented packets.

For those of you not using mTCP yet, it includes a DHCP client, FTP, IRC, Telnet, Ping, SNTP and Netcat. It runs on just about any (Free)DOS machine (virtual or otherwise) that you can find.


Regards,
Mike
 
mTCP 2010-11-27 Posted!

mTCP 2010-11-27 Posted!

A new version of mTCP is available in the usual place: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP .

If you are on an older clone machine and you have not been able to make the larger apps run correctly, then you want this version. The Watcom compiler runtime that I am using now was incorrectly flagging some machines as NEC PC9801 compatible, which was crashing machines that were not PC9801 compatible. Some of the machines that were hit by this bug were the Compaq Portable and the Epson Equity series. Thanks to MikeRM for helping me flush this latest problem out - it is a priority to me to make sure that these older machines run well.

(If your clone machine does hot have a normal looking copyright date in BIOS at FFFF:0005 then you were probably being hit by this bug. DHCP would work fine, but the bigger apps like FTP, IRCJR or Telnet would crash when sounding the beeper or reading the keyboard.)

There were some minor TCP/IP changes too to make it more robust if the apps run out of buffer space. This version is built using Open Watcom 1.9; previous versions of mTCP were built using Open Watcom 1.8.

One last note - if you have any problems at all, just drop an email. Also, if you are using mTCP on your machine I'd like to know what kind of machine it is - I'm compiling a list of machines that I know it works on. That will help me with compatibility testing so that I can avoid hiccups like the one above. The partial list at the moment is the PC, XT, AT, PCjr, Epson Equity, Compaq Portable, generic 386-40, Victor Technologies 'Vicky', generic 286-12, generic Pentium class machines, DOSBox (using the Hal-9000 builds), VMWare and VirtualBox.


Regards,
Mike
 
PC Convertible

PC Convertible

And a little extra testing, just for grins ...

(IBM PC Convertible with a PE3-10BT on irc.gimp.net #vc)

IBM_Convertible_IRCjr_1_smaller.jpg
 
After plenty of tips from Mike Brutman, I almost managed to connect to the Internet with two of my vintage PC's. First I have an Olivetti Prodest PC-1 that eventually got to boot DOS but which the Xircom packet driver doesn't detect my Xircom adapter in the parallel port. Then I managed to boot my Data General One, Model 2 with a version of Toshiba MS-DOS 2.11 and twice actually received an IP number from my router. However it would bail out and cause failed loopback tests after a while, probably due to the parallel port is not entirely compatible. That is why I was swapping around with power supplies.
data-general-one-booting.jpg
At least my trusty Commodore C286-LT works fine with the same Xircom adapter. It is not by far as cool as the IBM Convertible, but quite nice anyway:
commodore-c286lt.jpg
Mike is doing a great job with this networking software, and I'm sure with a bit more troubleshooting I might be able to bring up even more test machines working, as it might mostly be a hardware issue. Too bad neither of those systems has an ISA slot for internal expansion.
 
Part of the fun of the project is collecting reports of people getting their machines online.

I suspect that the DG probably can be made to work better. I'm assuming that you are using the external power adapter, otherwise nothing would work. The packet driver should be forced into 'non-bidirectional' mode just to be on the safe side. And you can disable hardware interrupts on the packet driver by setting that parameter to 0; that might be enough to get past whatever compatibility glitch is plaguing it.

As for machines without internal ISA slots. The various 'pocket ethernet' adapters that use a parallel port are a great option. (You are using a Xircom like I am.) The other option is to use a conventional serial port with a SLIP or PPP packet driver. While not as fast as an Ethernet connection, it still counts as running TCP/IP directly on your machine.

Mike
 
Well, despite my best intentions there was a pretty severe bug in that code. It affected machines using small MTUs where the other side was using a larger MTU setting.

Grab the latest code (2010-11-30) - it's fixed and tested. For that bug at least.

(This is unrelated to the other thread where we are having problems with an Intel 8/16 adapter on an XT.)
 
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