Using Packet drivers on DOS machines

[mbbrutman]

I run TCP/IP occasionally on a PCjr using a Xircom PE3-10 Ethernet adapter and Trumpet. Xircom provides a packet driver which works well. Trumpet works well enough, but I don't like the TSR approach.

What I'm shooting for is a BBS running on the Jr, accessed via telnet. I'm thinking of using the Xircom adapter and packet driver, and writing my own application that includes the TCP/IP layers. Kind of similar to the DOS NCSA Telnet/FTP package. I have the source code for this, so at least I think I have some sample code

Has anybody here used the packet interface and a packet driver in this way?

 

[mbbrutman]

Well, I made a little progress.

Today I was able to format a UDP packet containing 'hello world' and send it from one machine to a Linux machine. This involved doing the Ethernet packet header, the IP header, and the UDP header. Except for the IP checksum which is a PITA to compute, everything worked. (And I didn't have to refer to the NCSA source code .. not yet at least.)

Next up - clean up what I have, fix the IP header checksum, and then write the code to receive a UDP packet.

 

[mbbrutman]

More progress.

I finally got the code to receive a packet. The Xircom packet driver stymied me for a bit until I figured out the trick, and then after that it was easy.

Now I can send and receive UDP packets on my network. Next I guess is ARP for address resolution and then some higher level things, like adding TCP sockets. That's going to be a bit harder though.