First post, by swampfox
- Rank
- Newbie
Hopefully Marvin is okay for this, being older PC related.
I've recently been messing around with Novell DOS 7, which is a variant of DR-DOS bundled with Personal NetWare and some other additions.
Its a tad difficult to get full advantage of its networking capabilities, because you not only have to have a Netware ODI, but NDIS2 drivers, a packet driver, and NETX.EXE.
NETX is basically 'net start' for Netware, and it comes with it, but only as a Netware VLM (Virtual Loadable Module), which works fine with other NW-aware machines on the network, but to be able to do IPX/SPX with it over DOS, it needs NETX in an MZ-executable form, which was only available on a seperate Novell Applications Diskette.
In VirtualBox, setting up Networking is a PITA, because there are many different PCNet drivers out there. I finally AMD's official "LAN-32PCI" driver package on some foreign university's FTP server, and it comes with a nice GUI installer under DOS, even. However, after installing the initial ODI driver, it crashes and forced to reboot.
If you do it via command-line instead of the installer, Novell's internal SETUP doesn't do Plug-and-Play, so you have to set Interrupts, Ethernet frame type, and whatnot manually. VirtualBox doesn't give you this information, and option I've tried doesn't seem to work.
Perhaps I'll try it in DOSBox SVN Daum. I know for a fact NW works well with the NE2000. Hell, its Novells own card, and all the drivers are bundled with Netware.
But what would be more interesting, is setting up a NetWare LAN with real hardware! Which I plan on doing and documenting the event this weekend.
Got this ISA Ethernet Card. Can't really identify the make and model, but it clearly says its a Plug-and-Play NE2000 compatible, so I'm okay driver-wise. No gimped Winbond controller either, so I don't believe there are any real compatibility issues.
What I do not know, however, is whether it is 10BASE-T(10Mbps) or 100BASE-TX(Fast Ethernet).
Being an ISA card and related to the NE2000, I want to say the former.
Fast Ethernet came out in 1995, but they made ISA cards throughout the later half of the 90s, and NE2000s that were faster, as well.
There are no dates or FCC IDs on it.
Does anyone have any info? Much appreciated.
Also, if you can, feel free to share any NetWare experience or stories you may have. I know that there are many DOS games that support its IPX/SPX protocol. Anything there of interest?
My first time playing games over the internet was with DirectPlay (I assume TCP/IP) over a dial-up PPPoE connection with Doom 95.
Swampfox's Computing - Google+ and YouTube: https://plus.google.com/108854180391399268575