Estonian DOS computer hoarder here, and I just love this what you have done 😀

Yes. I like hosting things. And of course i love DOS 😀

how much resource does it use? is it resident in the background or printing logs all the time? will it handle 10-100 users simultaneously?
is the transfer low on your isp or is the server limited by the os?
have you benchmarked this thing?
what hardware is it running on?

Cool, you got any plans for the IRC server?

infania wrote:

Hey. My first post in here.

I run a webserver and FTP server in DOS. someone else running servers like that in DOS?
Experience? Do you have it online? Mine is running at http://dos.vintagepc.se/index.htm

It's so wrong it's right. Also, good history lesson for script kiddies.

mrau wrote:

how much resource does it use? is it resident in the background or printing logs all the time? will it handle 10-100 users simul […]
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how much resource does it use? is it resident in the background or printing logs all the time? will it handle 10-100 users simultaneously?
is the transfer low on your isp or is the server limited by the os?
have you benchmarked this thing?
what hardware is it running on?

I think it will only handle around 10 users. i have only 3 mbit out. But i feel that the webserver is the limit or DOS TCP/IP stack
Right now i run it in Virtualbox with 32mb ram and 60mb disk. but the host is dual xeon 2.4 and 2gb ram.
The first PC i run it on was a 8088 and 640kb. Just for fun.
The speed of FTP server locally is about 2mbit

oeuvre wrote:

Cool, you got any plans for the IRC server?

Not right now because the only version that i got to run is the one that accept only one connection at a time.

infania wrote:

Hey. My first post in here.

I run a webserver and FTP server in DOS. someone else running servers like that in DOS?
Experience? Do you have it online? Mine is running at http://dos.vintagepc.se/index.htm

I have an FTP server working on my IBM XT (true 5160 @ 4.77MHz) that I use sometimes to transfer files to it more conveniently than any other method. Had to search for a while before I came up with the perfect 8-bit NIC to use: The Intel LAN 8/16.

I don't have it exposed to the Internet, though.

how fast is an ftp on a 4.7 mhz box? ever tried to find the limits when it comes to parallel connections?
why is the intel lan 8/16 perfect? were there no ther 8 bit capables around? i understand there is no such thing as offloading anyway,right?

mrau wrote:

how fast is an ftp on a 4.7 mhz box? ever tried to find the limits when it comes to parallel connections?
why is the intel lan 8/16 perfect? were there no ther 8 bit capables around? i understand there is no such thing as offloading anyway,right?

I mean...slow. 😉 If you're really curious, I could hook it up again and do some benchmarking for you. But I'm pretty sure that the network connection is not the bottleneck. The system itself just can't conduct fast I/O across an 8-bit bus, no matter how awesome the drive or device is that's plugged into it. So maybe that answers your question. I should verify this, but I think it's pretty much as fast as copying files from an MFM hard drive to another drive, or perhaps as fast as copying files to/from an SSD hooked up to an XT-IDE card.

The Intel LAN 8/16 is perfect/awesome for five reasons.

1) The packet driver works perfectly in DOS 5.0 on an XT.

2) The cards are fairly common. I was able to purchase 3 of them at reasonable prices on eBay.

3) You can set the hardware resources the card uses (IRQ/"interrupt") with a very convenient program that was designed to flash the EEPROM built into the card itself.

4) Even though it's a 16-bit ISA card, it works when plugged into an 8-bit bus slot on the XT. It even has a special setting that can be changed in its EEPROM to force it to operate in 8-bit mode, meaning it doesn't even try to use the 16-bit extension on the card's bus connector.

5) It has a 32-pin EEPROM socket that can house a boot ROM, but that boot ROM doesn't have to have anything to do with PXE booting. I've got a re-flashed chip from one of my XT-IDE cards plugged into such a socket, and it enables me to use large/LBA/modern SSDs on any standard 16-bit IDE host adapter that's also plugged into the system. =)

thanks for the feedack - i obviously forgot there is no caching going on there;
i asked about performance because the png file is loading very very slowly, i wondered what could cause this;
also just noticed that it is Your specific NIC model that was tested with this server - zing, i guess;
anyway i don't want to occupy Your time with this, but thanks for the kind offer; i guess i'll try to get this thing into some VM and see what it can do - i do wonder if an XMS/EMS cache would help performance visibly (nerd alarm); another thing i was wondering about: does the task of preparing packets keep the cpu from handling disk reads at max performance and how much delay does the file system induce;