Get a Promise SATA 1 PCI card or even an ATA133 card and use that I stead of the onboard.

That will at least speed up the SSD.

For the SD card, it is either the throughput of the SD card or the adapter limiting the speed.

For SMB to even have a chance of working between the NAS and Windows 98SE, you will have to enable SMB v1 on the NAS if available. If it isn't available, then you are out of luck.

I will look into a SATA PCI card. That would put the drives on separate channels as well. I have the StarTech IDE2SATA adapter, which says it supports ATA-133, but it seems like using a PCI IDE or IDE/SATA combo card will disable the onboard IDE, and that seems like a headache. Can you boot to a drive connected to a SATA PCI controller as C:?

For the sdcard, the adapter is the limiting factor: https://goughlui.com/2019/02/03/tested-generi … dapter-sd35vc0/

For SMB in Unraid, I can enable/disable NetBIOS and WSB, and also supply "samba extra configuration" strings, but I can't find anyone else who has done this for Window 98 access.

Edit: I am able to connect to Unraid from Windows 98 with both those options enabled. Not sure what went wrong before, but this time I created a public share so I didn't have to deal with passwords and accounts, enabled NetBIOS but not WSB, fussed with some Windows network options, rebooted the PC, connected and mapped, and then re-enabled WSB on the server. It stays connected on reboot.

However, Norton Ghost 2003 does not have a driver for my Realtek 8169. I was able to set up the NDIS2 driver from here https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/cate … y/pci-8169-8110, but I get "error 58: the network responded incorrectly" when it boots to the DOS program. I got the same error with an Intel Pro 100 NIC.

I had to check you weren't the person with a similar thread, as my advice still applies! I don't know how much work you're doing with any frequency, but you should really just image the drive on another modern PC. I would never want to rely on 20 year old tech to solve a 20 year old problem when modern convenience affords you much better. Just pop the drive out, make an image, continue about your work until you need said image as backup.

I use a bootable Clonezilla ISO to back up my Windows 98 PC to a NAS over SMBv3.

ldeveraux wrote on 2023-07-26, 16:01:

Just pop the drive out, make an image, continue about your work until you need said image as backup.

I understand. I originally booted to the sdcard and attempted to take images of it on my Mac with `dd`, but I found I couldn't restore them to be bootable. Also, now that I'm booting to an SSD I don't want to open the case all the time. Ghost lets you browse and restore file-by-file from backups within Windows which is really nice.

y2k se wrote on 2023-07-26, 16:01:

I use a bootable Clonezilla ISO to back up my Windows 98 PC to a NAS over SMBv3.

I will try this. Is there a specific version of Clonezilla that works best for a Pentium 3?

I will try this. Is there a specific version of Clonezilla that works best for a Pentium 3?

I don't recall the exact version I'm running now but it's somewhere in the 2.6 series. Honestly I'd just grab the current version and see if that does okay.

I enabled my SMB logs and checked them and the Norton Ghost 2003 DOS client was failing to negotiate an acceptable protocol. To my surprise, "min protocol = LANMAN2" in the SMB server extra settings fixes it. You would think Ghost could have reported a meaningful error for this situation.

It's now backing up directly to the network at 13MB/s. About 90 minutes for 60GB of data. Amazing! Probably would be even faster without compression enable.

Thanks for going with me on this journey; maybe it will help somebody else. Don't forget to make your Ghost boot floppy in case you need to do a full restore.

copper wrote on 2023-07-26, 18:26:

I enabled my SMB logs and checked them and the Norton Ghost 2003 DOS client was failing to negotiate an acceptable protocol. To […]
Show full quote

I enabled my SMB logs and checked them and the Norton Ghost 2003 DOS client was failing to negotiate an acceptable protocol. To my surprise, "min protocol = LANMAN2" in the SMB server extra settings fixes it. You would think Ghost could have reported a meaningful error for this situation.

It's now backing up directly to the network at 13MB/s. About 90 minutes for 60GB of data. Amazing!

Thanks for going with me on this journey; maybe it will help somebody else. Don't forget to make your Ghost boot floppy with your network drivers in case you need to do a full restore.

IMG_5699.jpg

If Ghost is working, then I'd be concerned about the security of your NAS as that means it's accepting SMB1 connections, which are extremely insecure.

y2k se wrote on 2023-07-26, 19:16:

If Ghost is working, then I'd be concerned about the security of your NAS as that means it's accepting SMB1 connections, which are extremely insecure.

That’s fair, but it’s not exposed to the public internet. Someone would have to get inside the network first another way. I’m not sure how much I should worry about this.

I don’t think I have any other clients that support SMB1 that could be downgraded via an attack. And the win98 share is not protected anyway. But I’m not an SMB expert.

copper wrote on 2023-07-26, 19:22:

y2k se wrote on 2023-07-26, 19:16:

If Ghost is working, then I'd be concerned about the security of your NAS as that means it's accepting SMB1 connections, which are extremely insecure.

That’s fair, but it’s not exposed to the public internet. Someone would have to get inside the network first another way. I’m not sure how much I should worry about this.

I don’t think I have any other clients that support SMB1 that could be downgraded via an attack. And the win98 share is not protected anyway. But I’m not an SMB expert.

Unless every system with access to the NAS is air gapped, it's vulnerable. A rogue email can ransomware your data. An exploit in your router can allow access to your LAN devices.

For completeness, the options “ntlm auth = yes” and “lanman auth = yes” are necessary to get authenticated access working. Once you enable them you also have to set a new password for the network user.

After some research and conversation, it seems like the risk in modern usage of the old protocols is that an adversary on the LAN may be able to observe the credentials of actively connected SMB1/LANMAN clients. But if the server is patched, and you're not reusing passwords, and other clients restrict themselves to SMB2 and above, there is no additional risk to the server or to other accounts. So I'm not very worried about someone who has already breached the network stealing the Win98 credentials and doing Win98 things.

However, it looks like a project called RetroNAS (https://github.com/danmons/retronas)would be the ideal way to do this without even the possibility of opening modern systems to security issues. It will run a separate copy of smbd. There is an Unraid installer for RetroNAS, or you can run it on a Pi or dedicated PC.