How would / am I doing it? I've got a Pentium 100 machine and just went with Windows 98 SE + MS-DOS mode 7.1 😀

Windows networking is great and user friendly. This might not be what you're interested in but it works for me.

With MS-DOS networking I used mTCP with great success. It uses FTP though.

Yeah, I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going past DOS 6.22 on this machine. Windows isn't an option. 😀

I've been looking into the mTCP suite but for some reason it refuses to see my NIC on 0x310, which is the I/O address that the MS Network Client claims it has, so it won't let me initialize its stack. I only played around with that a little while last night, though (was tired after a couple hours of troubleshooting). Gonna revisit it tonight...

This describes one way to set up an MSDOS network boot floppy
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726979.aspx
It uses an NT server 4 CD to provide the basics, but some of the other points may be relevant.

The other thing, ensure that The Windows XP system has TCP/IP protocol bound to client and sharing, otherwise it will not use TCP/IP for these services.

Seconded for Windows. I would just stick 95 on it and be done with it.
DOS networking sucks.

If you can ping then try something else like FTP and see if you can login. If so then it's an issue with share\NTFS permissions or user credentials.

If you think it's a network issue (unlikely) you can always do crossover to the pc.

DOS networking is fine.....once it's setup.

Subjunctive wrote:

Yeah, I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going past DOS 6.22 on this machine. Windows isn't an option. 😀

I've been looking into the mTCP suite but for some reason it refuses to see my NIC on 0x310, which is the I/O address that the MS Network Client claims it has, so it won't let me initialize its stack. I only played around with that a little while last night, though (was tired after a couple hours of troubleshooting). Gonna revisit it tonight...

I have a new tool that might help you figure out packet driver problems. I'll pm you a link tonight.

(It scans the interrupt vectors for packet drivers and interrogates each one that it finds.)

I decided to go the FTP route - with success!

I figured out what I was doing wrong with mTCP: I didn't even have a packet driver loaded for my NIC.

So:

c:\intel\packet\exp16.com 0x60 0x310

0x60 - the packet driver interrupt - is what you feed to mTCP, not 0x310, the I/O address. Then you just set the MTCPCFG variable, run DHCP, and voila - I was able to get FTP from the mTCP suite working! It connected just fine to a WarFTP Daemon that I'd quickly set up on the XP machine, and after quickly relearning some FTP commands I was in business transferring files!

Thanks to everyone for their help and thanks especially to Mr. Brutman for writing this little suite of programs. Saved my bacon. I'm glad I was finally able to get TCP/IP working on DOS; although NWLink with IPX worked okay for me before, ultimately I wasn't thrilled about being beholden to it.

DosFreak wrote:

DOS networking is fine.....once it's setup.

That depends...If what you are using just interacts with a packet driver (for example Arachne and such), it isn't bad.

But things like Windows file sharing is close to worthless on DOS. 9x is overall a much more flexible networking platform

How about Windows 3.11 for workgroups? No experience with it myself but I have heard that it is pretty good.

Setup user rights on the server side.

Some software has problems connecting to a open guest account, resulting in an "access denied" message.

ODwilly wrote:

How about Windows 3.11 for workgroups? No experience with it myself but I have heard that it is pretty good.

It works well. It should piss easy to use the Dos network client on that box though. There's a ton of tutorials on the subject.

The OP should be able access the XP shares by just logging in as a user for that box. Same goes for accessing smb shares on a *nix box.

+1 for Win 3.11, If for no other reasion that its about the only real use windows has on a dos games PC.
Win95 or ftp methods are much better options though.

I'm not going past DOS 6.22 on this machine for a variety of reasons, but like I said, I was able to get it fixed anyway. I'm humming along with FTP now. mTCP and a little learning saved me!

What was weird was that, when I was trying to map the Windows share (via net.exe), and it told me Access Denied, it never prompted me for a username - just a password. Didn't seem to matter what users I set up on the XP machine, what level of access I gave them to the share, or what username or password file I configured in net.exe (I'm honestly still not sure what those were even for); nothing I entered for the password was accepted. So I started to suspect it wasn't just a credentials issue, and that's when I began seriously looking at TCP/IP. 😀

AHA... Enable your IPC$ user/share password.

IIRC you had to allow plaintext (or some weaker encryption) passwords on a 2K/XP machine to get MS Network Client to connect. Once you get it to work, it's much easier to use vs FTP, IMO.

Netbeui as a protocol works a treat too.