For security reasons your NAS likely won't accept any of the ancient authentication methods Windows 3.11 supports. If it's quite recent it might also not support the ancient version of the SMB protocol WFW 3.11 is trying to use.

Assuming your NAS is running Samba and don't mind compromising its security you might be able to edit the samba configuration files to enable lanman and ntlm authentication. I believe you'll have to set new passwords with smbpasswd after making such a change.

Edit: Alternatively, you could use a separate Raspberry Pi to provide file services to vintage machines. Might be worthwhile if you have more than one machine you want to network. Then you could run a separate less securely configured Samba instance, or EtherDFS to provide DOS network drives using its own protocol, or Mars NWE to provide DOS/Windows/OS2 network drives using the Novell NetWare protocols over IPX.

Thanks davidrg...I was concerned about the Samba role...You've given me some good food for thought. I may actually just do some FTP scripting for basic file moves/copies and be done with it. Either way, it will be a good little project trying to get something that's ultimately user friendly and functional.

Senior System Engine wrote on 2022-11-17, 02:29:

Thanks davidrg...I was concerned about the Samba role...You've given me some good food for thought. I may actually just do some FTP scripting for basic file moves/copies and be done with it. Either way, it will be a good little project trying to get something that's ultimately user friendly and functional.

I haven't exhausted all options, but I was not able to get a current version of SAMBA to play nice with Windows 98 SE recently.

Re: RetroNAS - open source server software for your retro machines

Yeah, for this reason I've pretty much given up on Samba. Even if it works today, its really on borrowed time. Relatively few Samba users use it for networking vintage machines so security and features for modern systems will always take priority. Having known insecure rarely used code hanging around, even if its disabled by default, is a bit of a liability.

But network drives are really too convenient to just give up on. Especially on older systems that may have limited disk space - its nice being able to run games and other software from the network rather than having to install it locally. Or install stuff directly from the network without having to copy all the install files onto the PC first.

Mars NWE does seem to pretty much solve this problem. Though it isn't without its downsides, it works fine with DOS, Windows 3.x/9x/NT/2000/XP/2003 and OS/2. Ideally its something RetroNAS would include given the issues with Samba but RetroNAS seems to be more focused on consoles these days rather than PCs. It's pretty trivial to build from source though.