boratintheuk wrote:

I didn't even consider FTP!!

I just setup a little server with Filezilla and was able to access it over the network with ftp.exe on the Windows 95 machine. Thanks for the tips guys.

Try to use something more handy than ftp.exe. There are many options available. For example: Total Commander, Double Commander or Far Manager. All of those double-panel file managers have ftp client built in or available via plugins. Later two are free/open source. Far manager is console based, it looks like Norton Commander, but is full 32 bit windows application. For 1st gen Pentium machine I would use last of 1.x line.

Ah, there is also Necromancer Dos Navigator. Its network support in dos is not very stable (however I was able to run its ftp client on one of my builds - Cyrix 5x86/100 maybe it's speed sensitive), but in Windows 9x Dos shell it works very well.

There's also anoher alternative to FTP and TCP/IP.

EtherDFS - a network drive for DOS
EtherDFS - a network drive for DOS

The simplest and most robust way for me is plain old FTP. No need for moving hardware around, no need for additional hardware (storage adapters, NAS, file servers, linux servers, etc.) or for installing unfamiliar software. And it's easy to access from any retro OS you might use, not just Windows 95. Only thing you need to set up is a simple FTP server; Windows even already comes with one (though it's usually not installed by default). And if the built-in server is not your thing, then something like FileZilla is free and easy to set up. And on the client end, well at least in Windows 9x and onward, you don't even need anything, internet explorer will do in a pinch. You just point it at your ftp server, instead of a http address, like so: ftp://ftpuser:password@your.ftp.server.ip:port. You can also bookmark that like you would any other url, to save yourself having to type it each time. If you access it more often, then get yourself a dedicated ftp client or use something like Total Commander.

Only downside to FTP is you can't use it exactly like a network drive. So if you want to access it frequently and transfer files in both directions regularly, then some other solution would be more convenient.

appiah4 wrote:

Just use FTP, it has worked for nearly 40 years.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Total Commander has built-in FTP support. This is what I use on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I manage to get the TCP/IP stack working in WFW but NFS and SMB are where I stumbled for weeks, so just settled on FTP. 😀 I'd still love to be able to map drive letters to my QNAP NAS, and I generally think I know the problem (I think it's user-level vs. share-level authentication) but I'm terrified of SSHing into the QNAP and making changes to Samba for fear of breaking future firmware updates or something. 😁

dr.zeissler wrote:

I connect all my machine from 286 upwards and macs from lc475 upwards to my NAS in order to transfer files.
In plain Dos I use the MSClinet30 (TCP/IP) and TCP/IP is installed within W3x/9x and AppleTalk for the macs.

I wish that I could get that to work. 😀 Someday, I'll try to connect to my QNAP NAS again using SMB or NFS. 😀

Thallanor wrote:

dr.zeissler wrote:

I connect all my machine from 286 upwards and macs from lc475 upwards to my NAS in order to transfer files.
In plain Dos I use the MSClinet30 (TCP/IP) and TCP/IP is installed within W3x/9x and AppleTalk for the macs.

I wish that I could get that to work. 😀 Someday, I'll try to connect to my QNAP NAS again using SMB or NFS. 😀

It also is/was possible to run a pure AppleTalk network with DOS/Win3.11. A while ago, I saw a very interesting blog entry about LocalTalk PC cards..
it was called "A LocalTalk PC card, a Macintosh Plus and a Linux box." Perhaps a software like PhoneNET PC has got drivers for NE2000 compatible NICs, too.

Jo22 wrote:

It also is/was possible to run a pure AppleTalk network with DOS/Win3.11. A while ago, I saw a very interesting blog entry about LocalTalk PC cards..
it was called "A LocalTalk PC card, a Macintosh Plus and a Linux box." Perhaps a software like PhoneNET PC has got drivers for NE2000 compatible NICs, too.

Interesting! I never thought of looking into other methods like that. I'd need to see what my NAS supports. The other solution that I considered was a simple Linux VM that _is_ running older, less-secure, dumbed-down Samba shares, and see if I create a share on that Linux VM that is essentially a symbolic link to the actual share on the NAS. 😀 Lock down the Linux VM so it only allows connections from a couple specific IPs and keep it off the internet and viola. None of that might actually work though. 😁

1541 wrote:

@Dr.Zeissler: In order to connect to Synology with SMB and a crypted password, you need to follow this approach: Re: Adding my 4 […]
Show full quote

@Dr.Zeissler: In order to connect to Synology with SMB and a crypted password, you need to follow this approach:
Re: Adding my 486 to my Network

If you come across this screen ("No permission to access resource") upon writing from Win9x to another ressource, you can try to install the NTLM 2 authentication for Windows 9x/NT (DSclient.exe).
Follow this approach: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl … k-zugreifen.htm

(The "SMB1" option has to be enabled in the Synology NAS of course)

Thank you so much for this! I wanted to have an access to my Synology NAS even from my retro PCs with Windows 98, and I can confirm, that this guide still works, even on the latest DSM (currently 6.2.2). Once there will be update to DSM 7.0 available, I'll will post the results of the testing here as well.

Well, I can tell you what I finally did to solve MY issues transferring files to my Windows 95 retro machines. Since I don't want to keep burning CD-Rs to move files bigger than 1.4MBs on floppies and I have no USB ports for thumb drives, I ended up having to work with what I did have available - a really old copy of Netscape Navigator 4.04. As everyone knows, the modern internet uses SSL and HTML6 and all kinds of new technologies that Netscape couldn't possibly know about, so NO internet pages work properly, even this forum. What was my fix? I have an in-house media server running Ubuntu Server for PLEX streaming. I also use it as a share drive server. So I added a simple Apache web service and I made an EXTREMELY basic page in order to link files for download. Now I can just download my video card drivers, simple program installers, WinZip, ImgBurn, etc. Just point, click, download, install. It doesn't require passwords or accounts, just enough knowledge of the web server back-end to get the files linked and I'm done.

Srandista wrote on 2019-08-07, 19:23:

1541 wrote:

@Dr.Zeissler: In order to connect to Synology with SMB and a crypted password, you need to follow this approach: Re: Adding my 4 […]
Show full quote

@Dr.Zeissler: In order to connect to Synology with SMB and a crypted password, you need to follow this approach:
Re: Adding my 486 to my Network

If you come across this screen ("No permission to access resource") upon writing from Win9x to another ressource, you can try to install the NTLM 2 authentication for Windows 9x/NT (DSclient.exe).
Follow this approach: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl … k-zugreifen.htm

(The "SMB1" option has to be enabled in the Synology NAS of course)

Thank you so much for this! I wanted to have an access to my Synology NAS even from my retro PCs with Windows 98, and I can confirm, that this guide still works, even on the latest DSM (currently 6.2.2). Once there will be update to DSM 7.0 available, I'll will post the results of the testing here as well.

Alright, I can confirm now, that this still works even under DSM 7.0 Beta, so even with absolute latest available Synology OS. Which is great, because I can still enjoy the simplest way how to share data to all my retro PCs.

Use mTCP as a FTP server and then a modern FTP client on your modern PC to 'push' the content to your retro PC.

I've had ~800kbytes/sec out of the mTCP client/server on a 16mhz 286 and a 3c509b with a modern IDE drive.

MTCP is way, way simpler than modifying SMB config on Linux or editing th registry keys in Windows to support the old insecure lanman Auth, plus you only need the network service running on your dos machine when you actually do the transfer, the rest of the time there's no drivers or network services using precious ram.

MTCP is probably one of the best pieces of software in the retro computer owners toolkit!

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-06-01, 18:49:

Use mTCP as a FTP server and then a modern FTP client on your modern PC to 'push' the content to your retro PC. […]
Show full quote

Use mTCP as a FTP server and then a modern FTP client on your modern PC to 'push' the content to your retro PC.

I've had ~800kbytes/sec out of the mTCP client/server on a 16mhz 286 and a 3c509b with a modern IDE drive.

MTCP is way, way simpler than modifying SMB config on Linux or editing th registry keys in Windows to support the old insecure lanman Auth, plus you only need the network service running on your dos machine when you actually do the transfer, the rest of the time there's no drivers or network services using precious ram.

MTCP is probably one of the best pieces of software in the retro computer owners toolkit!

I concur kind sir....

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-06-01, 18:49:

MTCP is way, way simpler than modifying SMB config on Linux or editing th registry keys in Windows to support the old insecure lanman Auth.

For me on my NAS, it's a matter of changing value in one drop down menu. And since I'm using SMB on modern machine too, it's the most convinient setup possible. Of course I'm talking about accessing storage from Win 98 and higher OSes. For earlier systems, it wouldn't be an option, in those cases I would use FTP for sure.