Packet Driver for Xircom RE-100

[maelstrm]

Has anyone had any luck with a packet driver for the Xircom RE-100 PCMCIA card?

I've been trying to get it to work under DOS with MTCP. But each time, DHCP times out and says to check the cabling and packet driver settings. I have Card Services running (C:\CARDSOFT), and it is detected by Card Services. But I get no link lights.

I'm running PC DOS 6.3 on a Toshiba 4005CDT. I have also tried with MS-DOS 6.22 but with no luck.

In my autoexec.bat, I have:

CBEPD.COM SINT=6A

And my MTCP.CFG file has

packetint 0x6A

If this is changed, MTCP's DHCP won't even run, and it will error out with "could not set up packet driver."

At startup, I get (from Card Services) "The driver has been successfully registered with Card Services".

I tested the card with this same machine using Windows 98, and the card itself works fine.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Oh man, that got my attention! So Xircom was headquartered about 10 miles from where I live, my father worked there in the 90s, and I grew up attending "take your children to work days" at their headquarters. A lot of my computer equipment growing up even had xircom asset tags. The company folded when they did not accurately predict the rise of wifi and pivot accordingly. So of course the company founder went off and founded a wireless company called Xirrus. I worked for Xirrus in the late 2010s alongside several former xircom employees. Dirk Gates now runs Tarana Wireless, a wifi-based ISP.

Of course none of this information helps you, sorry. I can check and see if by some miracle my dad still talks to any of the engineers, and if by n even bigger miracle they happen to have retained the source for nigh on 25 years.

 

[mbbrutman]

Does the packet driver have other settings or options? If so, what are they?

mTCP is finding the packet driver in memory, which is good. (When you change the packetint setting it doesn't find it, hence that error message.) But it sounds like packets are not actually getting in or out. You can try to run the pkttool program in mTCP - it has a "sniffer" that just listens for incoming packets. If you run that for a few minutes and never see a packet that will confirm the problem.

You might try changing the interrupt from 0x6A to something else; pick something unused between 0x60 and 0x6F. And if you have the hardware interrupt wrong packets will be sent by not received. The mTCP PDF documentation has a debugging section that explains these things.

 

[maelstrm]

Oh man, that got my attention! So Xircom was headquartered about 10 miles from where I live, my father worked there in the 90s, and I grew up attending "take your children to work days" at their headquarters. A lot of my computer equipment growing up even had xircom asset tags. The company folded when they did not accurately predict the rise of wifi and pivot accordingly. So of course the company founder went off and founded a wireless company called Xirrus. I worked for Xirrus in the late 2010s alongside several former xircom employees. Dirk Gates now runs Tarana Wireless, a wifi-based ISP.

Of course none of this information helps you, sorry. I can check and see if by some miracle my dad still talks to any of the engineers, and if by n even bigger miracle they happen to have retained the source for nigh on 25 years.

Interesting back story! It's a shame they didn't see the coming success of wireless. I mean, who wants wires? Well..ok maybe we do but most people don't...

 

[maelstrm]

Does the packet driver have other settings or options? If so, what are they?

mTCP is finding the packet driver in memory, which is good. (When you change the packetint setting it doesn't find it, hence that error message.) But it sounds like packets are not actually getting in or out. You can try to run the pkttool program in mTCP - it has a "sniffer" that just listens for incoming packets. If you run that for a few minutes and never see a packet that will confirm the problem.

You might try changing the interrupt from 0x6A to something else; pick something unused between 0x60 and 0x6F. And if you have the hardware interrupt wrong packets will be sent by not received. The mTCP PDF documentation has a debugging section that explains these things.

Thanks for the reply. See my forthcoming doofus answer...

 

[maelstrm]

Ok, so the WHOLE problem was that I was using the wrong driver. I was trying to initialize the card with:

CBEPD.COM

instead of:

CE3PD.COM

It pays to read kids. And it pays more to keep your eyesight.

FWIW and for future readers of this post, this card (Xircom RE-100) works without using any kind of Card Services (with PC DOS 6.3, haven't attempted yet with MS-DOS 6.22 or earlier).

Just run

CE3PD.COM VERBOSE=ON

and note the software interrupt given by the output, denoted as

SINT

Mine says

SINT 60

.

And make sure that value matches what's in your MTCP.CFG file (e.g.

packetinit 0x60

) and viola! You'll be hopping BBS's and reading text news in no time!

Thanks everyone

This package contains CE3PD.COM:

https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=61305

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Interesting back story! It's a shame they didn't see the coming success of wireless. I mean, who wants wires? Well..ok maybe we do but most people don't...

They saw it coming but thought it would take a few more years to reach dominance. Then a couple years after that PCMCIA cards went away entirely. If they had been able to get into wifi cards they would have been glorious.