Re: Expected network throughput on ISA network cards

Posted on 2024-01-27, 23:36

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by mbbrutman

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You're not going to get anywhere near 10 megabits with an ISA NIC. Lucky if you approach half that. Sorry, you are flat out wrong here. See http://brutmanlabs.org/mTCP/mTCP_Performance.html for some data points. I have a Compaq 4/33 that I've measured at 900KB/sec receiving and 1000KB/sec receiving …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-26, 17:36

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

Retries on a local network should be rare, especially with modern hardware. Even on my older hardware (PCjr) I have to work hard to get a packet to drop, and I usually just give up and simulate that by throwing random packets away on the server side. I don't have a lot of experience with the ODI …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-25, 18:07

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

Oh, one more quick test for the CHKDSK problem. If you run NETDRIVE STATUS d: before CHKDSK it will give you packet statistics, including retries. Please run that first, then CHKDSK, and then get the statistics again. If the retry count went up then it's definitely CHKDSK getting a timeout, but not …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-25, 18:04

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

Thanks for the feedback. Some quick responses: I think the warning message that asks the user if they specified the correct drive letter is sufficient. I don't want to add more code to scan for the device driver in memory, as that takes yet more RAM when the program runs and it's getting tight on a …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-21, 23:24

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

I've made some changes to the server side: I've added a "headless" mode for people who don't want to use the text UI. It's not a full Unix-style daemon but you can throw it in the background now and you can probably use "daemonize" on it. An ARM version of the server is available now. (Somebody else …

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Re: Old ISA 8bit LAN Card help!!!

Posted on 2024-01-19, 15:58

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by mbbrutman

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

mig81, Do yourself a favor. If you are a novice to networking don't start playing the game on "hard" mode. Get one of these cards to start: NE1000 or a clone NE2000 known to run in an 8 bit slot 3C503 Intel EtherExpress 8/16 Anything that has a DOS packet driver (look it up before you buy) In …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-18, 17:33

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

I will eventually add support for a second drive letter so that you can mount two images at the same time. Going to four isn't even that difficult, it just takes more room. (I need a few dozen bytes of storage for each connected drive letter to maintain state.) FAT32 is slightly more work. The …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-08, 21:22

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

Why weren't cool apps like this and the EtherDFS/ethflop utilities ever written and released back in the 90's? Is there a technical difficulty that a DOS server version would have been impossible? Was everyone just in a hurry to update their skills for Windows dev tools and didn't want to spend …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-08, 21:11

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'm actively testing the next round of server side changes: Fix the read-only file detection bug reported earlier. Implement a "headless" mode ... it's not a true Unix daemon but it will be closer. (You will be able to throw it in the background and cleanly terminate it with SIGTERM.) Add more …

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Re: SoftMPU network support with packet driver

Posted on 2024-01-02, 19:53

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by mbbrutman

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

No need to be puzzled ... The packet driver spec has you register a handler for each packet type you are interested in. EtherDFS does not conflict with IP or ARP, so you can have two different handlers. But if EtherDFS used IP that would not be possible.

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Re: SoftMPU network support with packet driver

Posted on 2024-01-02, 17:29

by

by mbbrutman

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

That was the corner case I was referring to. The actual limitation has more to do with the packet driver can only be given one receiver function for a given set of EtherTypes. So while any code anywhere can send just by using the packet driver interrupt, only one receiver function can be called for …

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Re: SoftMPU network support with packet driver

Posted on 2024-01-01, 19:37

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by mbbrutman

in SoftMPU

in SoftMPU

Picking up an old thread ... In the time between my last reply on this thread and now I've figured out how to reliably send and receive UDP packets from device driver code through a packet driver. UDP wasn't easy, but it's much easier than TCP. The code is readily adaptable to a TSR. For this …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-22, 00:14

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

Excellent work again mbbrutman, thank you! My use case is mostly creating drive backups into a single image file that's easy to update. A big plus is that it preserves file attributes, which I believe you cannot do with FTP. Although WinImage seems to ignore them when extracting files from the …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-20, 22:24

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

On Linux, netdrive reports "Error opening file" if file permissions are read only for image file. I do not want to give RW access to my images. Can netdrive open image files read-only ? What exact file permissions did you use on the image file? The code certainly handles read-only files; I designed …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-20, 18:43

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

On Linux, netdrive reports "Error opening file" if file permissions are read only for image file. I do not want to give RW access to my images. Can netdrive open image files read-only ? What exact file permissions did you use on the image file? The code certainly handles read-only files; I designed …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-17, 18:24

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

changing media, yes. changing media *type* no. AFAIK you cannot change the DPB you pass to DOS at the time the block device is loaded after the fact Media type changes all of the time ... The perfect example is using a 1.2MB floppy and then a 360K floppy. Same device, two different media types, …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-17, 04:18

by

by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

changing media, yes. changing media *type* no. AFAIK you cannot change the DPB you pass to DOS at the time the block device is loaded after the fact Media type changes all of the time ... The perfect example is using a 1.2MB floppy and then a 360K floppy. Same device, two different media types, …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-17, 04:16

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

General question directed at anyone who knows: does DOS even support changing media for block filesystems? I think for example Zip disks were treated as removable media, but I presume they always went through an ASPI layer (or was that only for the SCSI models?), so I presume they weren't treated …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-15, 00:58

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

There's no strict 2GB partition limit in MS-DOS 5/6, it technically can support around 3GB no problem. However, this requires patching of a few DOS files. It's also not very efficient with FAT16B and a lot of small files. But if only a handful of large files are being stored, it might be useful. …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2023-12-15, 00:51

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by mbbrutman

in Milliways

in Milliways

I just gave a thought to the 7 CD Phantasmagoria, which needs some severe disk swapping during gameplay. Due to the 2gb limit, my first thought is that it'd be impossible to go beyond 3 mounted CDs at a time roughly using a netdrive. Then I tried the following: -(from modern PC) Put CD1 iso into a …

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