All you will ever need is a DOS TCP packet driver for your NIC and mTCP: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/
I use it on my 386/486 and p1 DOS builds, it's just excellent. You setup the ftp server on the mTCP side and then from whatever main computer you have you launch a FTP client, connect to the old pc and transfer files

keropi wrote:

All you will ever need is a DOS TCP packet driver for your NIC and mTCP: http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/
I use it on my 386/486 and p1 DOS builds, it's just excellent. You setup the ftp server on the mTCP side and then from whatever main computer you have you launch a FTP client, connect to the old pc and transfer files

+1 for mTCP.

I even use it on a Tandy 1000. It's brilliant.

Ah good old FTP. Why didn't I think of that? 😁

I use mTCP as well. I set up an FTP server on my DOS machine and that lets me connect to it from pretty much any modern machine, and use a graphical FTP client to easily get files on the DOS machine 😀

In your mtcp config file I find these settings really help (your results will vary depending on specs of your system:)

FTPSRV_FILEBUFFER_SIZE 16kb
FTPSRV_PACKETS_PER_POLL 10
FTPSRV_CLIENTS 10
FTPSRV_TCPBUFFER_SIZE 16kb

In your FTP Client (I use FileZilla) set a speed limit of 100kb/s and max simultaneous connections to 1.

The HTTP server is in the works ...

Cool. I am going to install NE2000s and EtherLink IIs in my 80286+ and 8086 systems and install NetWare Lite. 😁

does a 16bit isa ethernet card (cogent em110) work in a 8bit slot?

FastLynx in IPX mode instead of clunky FTP.

Another option is MS Network Client, which allows you to mount shared folders on a Windows machine to a drive letter and access it like a second harddrive. It eats a lot of memory though.

jwt27 wrote:

Another option is MS Network Client, which allows you to mount shared folders on a Windows machine to a drive letter and access it like a second harddrive. It eats a lot of memory though.

I run a FreeBSD NFS server, and all my DOS computers connect to it with a DOS NFS client called XFS. Quarterdeck's OPTIMIZE can load all of it into UMB (probably MS LanMan too).

Just a general question.

Would it be possible to install WIndows 3.11 for Network (or what it is called) and then share folders on the network? Just like it is possible with Win9x and up.

vetz wrote:

Just a general question.

Would it be possible to install WIndows 3.11 for Network (or what it is called) and then share folders on the network? Just like it is possible with Win9x and up.

You mean Windows for Workgroups? Sure, probably – but I'm not sure why you would bother.

You can also in theory use the MS network client for DOS to access shared folders on another computer, but it can be tricky hammering out the details, especially in comparison to the simplicity of mTCP.

Jorpho wrote:

vetz wrote:

Just a general question.

Would it be possible to install WIndows 3.11 for Network (or what it is called) and then share folders on the network? Just like it is possible with Win9x and up.

You mean Windows for Workgroups? Sure, probably – but I'm not sure why you would bother.

You can also in theory use the MS network client for DOS to access shared folders on another computer, but it can be tricky hammering out the details, especially in comparison to the simplicity of mTCP.

Yes, that's the name 😀

I'm planning on having Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups installed for some 3.11 gaming on my 386. Then I thought I might as well share the drive and enable file transfer directly from Windows Explorer on my Win7 machine.

I use a different solution. Since the authentication of Windows Vista and newer (via NTLM) does not work with Win 3.x I setup a Linux in a Virtual Machine. There are several suggestion how to lower the authentication level of Win7 but it didn't worked here. The Linux uses a Samba server that shares folders with lowest authentication level possible. This works pretty good, I can make any folder available that the Linux VM can mount.
In my simple case I mount a folder through the virtual machine extensions and make this available to my vintage PCs.
As it is a VM I can also clone and move it where ever it is suitable.

vetz wrote:

I'm planning on having Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups installed for some 3.11 gaming on my 386. Then I thought I might as well share the drive and enable file transfer directly from Windows Explorer on my Win7 machine.

Well, sharing a folder on the 386 that is accessible from Windows 7 is different from sharing a folder on your Windows 7 machine that is accessible from your 386. I'm not sure why you would want to do it the first way instead of the second way.

elianda wrote:

I use a different solution. Since the authentication of Windows Vista and newer (via NTLM) does not work with Win 3.x I setup a Linux in a Virtual Machine. There are several suggestion how to lower the authentication level of Win7 but it didn't worked here. The Linux uses a Samba server that shares folders with lowest authentication level possible. This works pretty good, I can make any folder available that the Linux VM can mount.
In my simple case I mount a folder through the virtual machine extensions and make this available to my vintage PCs.
As it is a VM I can also clone and move it where ever it is suitable.

Isn't Samba (SMB) an entirely different protocol than what is used by Win 3.x (NetBIOS) ?

EDIT: Oh, Samba does that too.

I have tried WfW sharing , it works but it's slow, on my setup it was ~3 times slower than mTCP's ftp server.

Half-Saint wrote:

I just stuck a 3com EtherLink III in my 386 system but now I'm at a loss as to what I can actually do with it. […]
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I just stuck a 3com EtherLink III in my 386 system but now I'm at a loss as to what I can actually do with it.

Ideally I'd like to transfer files from my Pentium system since it has full Internet access and can be used as a file server for the 386.

What do I need except for a DOS driver for this to work?

Cheers

First thing that came to my mind was an image of working on PC's in the 90's... an image of a LapLink cable.

🤣, I know, I still have one as well as my first coax network cable with terminators (10BASE-T).

LapLink works great with INTERSRV / INTERLNK & FastLynx on 8086 and up.