new user here. Please be kind to me
I was about to mention $25NET, but it has already been mentioned. I found another side that also claims to have it. IIRC it comes with a readme file. I haven't got anything installed to peek into IMG files (I tried 7zip which as expected didn't support IMG files). If you want to, have a go at it:
I vaguely remember that it used odd error messages for certain situations, like out of paper on device G: and so on.
I assume that it uses the serial port hardware directly, as it would be impossible to achieve any decent speed using BIOS calls. This makes it not trivial to modify it to for example use parallel port.
I remember some site/thread somewhere where someone did what I would call an ADHD attempt at reverse engineering the INTERSVR/INTERLNK protocol, but only had a look at what must had been a few percent, I.E. the first handshake phase or so. It would be nice if someone took the time to reverse engineer the full protocol.
If you want to use the parallel port you could use a PLIP packet driver and network software that supports packet drivers.
I don't know of any shim that allows makes a packet driver be used with network software that expects a NDIS (Microsoft) or ODI (Novel) driver, so you'd have to set up something like a NFS client. Perhaps a bit too much work.
Sorry if I'm captain obvious here, but have you considered using a Xircom pocket ethernet adapter or similar?
Also, what happens if you try running INTERLNK/INTERSVR on something that isn't MS/PC-DOS?
Btw although I assume you want to share files rather than disk images, it's worth knowing that the XTIDE Universal Bios has a built in client for disk image sharing over the serial port, intended to be able to boot an emulated floppy image. Also there are at least two different ways of loading XTIDE Universal Bios from a bootable floppy, so to try this out you don't even have to have XTIDE Universal BIOS as a ROM.