If you use a rPi, why not hook up a silent big hdd instead of these old ones?

The hardware setup would work. Since you're set on using wifi, which will be the bottleneck if the old computers aren't, you don't have to worry about USB performance etc of the Pi.

Networking old OS:es will never be secure, but as long as they're not exposed to the internet you'll be fine. New versions of Samba can serve old versions of SMB, at least W95 works flawlessly with it. Haven't tried anything older, but can't see why it shouldn't work. Would use that for Windows machines. You can of course set up an FTP server too, no problems running both.

No idea at all about how to connect the Radio Shack computer. Is there an FTP client for it perhaps?

A Raspi would work fine for this, as would any number of options. FTP would be a versatile choice, but SAMBA (probably even to LANMAN), EtherDFS, NCP over IPX, and many others would be options as well. It all depends on what would be fun and productive for you, I think.

I can confirm that samba works even in DOS or WFW3.11

You can even combine it with a FTP server if you want.

I have a Pi 2 hooked up to a laptop HDD and has a WiFi dongle connected to it. It operates as a router, DHCP server, pxe server and file server. It works flawlessly and makes really your life easier ^^

Any computer with a NIC can benefit from it, from the old 8088 to the beefy p3 (though, an 8088 won't run the samba client for DOS, but FTP will be ok)

Imo, FTP is more versatile, but SMB is more practical. Since you can combine both, you should use both ^^

Dominus wrote:

If you use a rPi, why not hook up a silent big hdd instead of these old ones?

Because I have the drives, and a ZeroW would cost little more than the $10, at least initially. Gotta go cheap now, since work is cutting hours now and my already limited funds are even more limited 😢

Still, 260gb would be a lot for retro systems, I think.

kaputnik wrote:

The hardware setup would work. Since you're set on using wifi, which will be the bottleneck if the old computers aren't, you don't have to worry about USB performance etc of the Pi.

Networking old OS:es will never be secure, but as long as they're not exposed to the internet you'll be fine. New versions of Samba can serve old versions of SMB, at least W95 works flawlessly with it. Haven't tried anything older, but can't see why it shouldn't work. Would use that for Windows machines. You can of course set up an FTP server too, no problems running both.

No idea at all about how to connect the Radio Shack computer. Is there an FTP client for it perhaps?

Well, they'll be exposed to the internet some (one of my projects I'm determined to do "someday" is to get Arachne browser to support SSL so DOS machines can access secure sites, like YouTube and Twitter).

A for the Model T (Radio Shack Model 100), there's a program for Windows called "LaddieAlpha" and another for Linux called "Desklink" that allows the Win/Linux system to emulate a Tandy Portable Disk Drive. It should work in parallel with an FTP/Samba server. In fact, I've thought about telnet onto the ZeroW system from the M100 in order to control it.

(side note / plug... there's a Radio Shack Model 100/102/200 mailing list that's still quite active, for anyone interested in those systems)

Apart from ftp and Samba Marsnwe as a free Netware protocol based server should be considered. Setting up a Netware client for DOS is easy and its a much more retro Style Server system than an actual Samba implementation.
eisapc

Maybe I'm a bit Unix-centric, but NFS is my no-nonsense protocol for legacy and modern systems; I use FTP as backup for OSs without decent NFS client.

As for the Pi, I don't see the logic in combining a current computer with legacy HDDs. I 'd either use a Pi with big, quiet, efficient modern drive, or go for a truly vintage server, maybe a simple 486, but personally I' d go for a Sun IPX if I went down that route. Except I don't, I just run NFS and FTP on my regular Core i3 Linux homeserver with big 2Tb drives in RAID 1

dionb wrote:

Maybe I'm a bit Unix-centric, but NFS is my no-nonsense protocol for legacy and modern systems; I use FTP as backup for OSs without decent NFS client.

As for the Pi, I don't see the logic in combining a current computer with legacy HDDs. I 'd either use a Pi with big, quiet, efficient modern drive, or go for a truly vintage server, maybe a simple 486, but personally I' d go for a Sun IPX if I went down that route. Except I don't, I just run NFS and FTP on my regular Core i3 Linux homeserver with big 2Tb drives in RAID 1

The logic is cost.

Hamby wrote:

Dominus wrote:

If you use a rPi, why not hook up a silent big hdd instead of these old ones?

Because I have the drives, and a ZeroW would cost little more than the $10, at least initially. Gotta go cheap now, since work is cutting hours now and my already limited funds are even more limited 😢

Still, 260gb would be a lot for retro systems, I think.

I have had Samba running on anything from desktop Linux and Ubuntu server on various laptop's and desktop's, to both RaspberryPi and OrangePI's. What I still fear, is that a "PI" computer will run too hot in the long run, unless you install some good cooling.... Means more money to spend.... And I think a thin client of some sort or a Via C3 based mini-ITX would be an even better choice.

If you choose to go ahead with this project, and end up using Linux. Then go for a server system. One that are command line based, and then install a web based GUI instead of a local one (Gnome, KDE and all that). Like Webmin or something like that.

http://www.webmin.com/download.html

Well my pi 2 has been running for month without any problem, and I don't think there will be any in the future

Deksor wrote:

Well my pi 2 has been running for month without any problem, and I don't think there will be any in the future

Hmmm.... Then it may only be the OrangePI Zero, that has these heat issues without cooling, while running 24/7.

Hamby wrote:

one of my projects I'm determined to do "someday" is to get Arachne browser to support SSL so DOS machines can access secure sites, like YouTube and Twitter).

You might want to make other plans. Web browsing is one of the most demanding things modern computers do. It seems like a simple task, but HTML is a terribly inefficient language that is regularly beaten into submission to build the modern UIs we're accustomed to. Rendering that sort of "everything depends on the size and location of everything else" iterative solution is a huge task alone. Decoding and presenting MPEG4 video (ala YouTube, or the ads in any given blog or news site) is never going to happen on a PC older than a Pentium 4.

As for the file serving -- I would agree that an SD card is probably a better storage medium than trying to re-use old hard disks. I've calculated this out myself a few times and always arrived at the same conclusion: When 4TB drives are cheap and common, it stops making sense to aggregate piles of 500GB drives. I know you don't need nearly that much, which is all the more reason why the logistics of setting up a Pi with a USB hub, USB enclosures, and multiple spinning disks compared to a single SD-to-USB adapter that can hold it all with zero cabling and nearly zero power draw, makes no sense at all. A 32GB SD card with USB adapter will set you back $10 if you don't already have six of them propping up the corner of your keyboard. 😉 Just my 2c.

That said, a Linux file server running SAMBA and (pick your favorite ftpd -- mine is PureFTPd) is super handy, and pretty much bulletproof. I reboot mine when I lose power -- and only then because my old UPS became less reliable than the local grid. I did manage to keep my NAS running while moving once, by being the last thing unplugged at the old place, and the first thing plugged in at the new place. Was more curious if I could pull it off than anything else. My record was something over 580 days.

Hamby wrote:

one of my projects I'm determined to do "someday" is to get Arachne browser to support SSL so DOS machines can access secure sites, like YouTube and Twitter).

Ugh I've tried Arachne on my 486DX33 the other day ... It was PAINFULLY SLOW even for that kind of machine I tried to load a phpbb forum with a style made for old web browsers, and it was just taking say 5 minutes to load a page ... And no It's not the computer showing it's age,the sale computer with WFW3.11 and IE4 loads the same website in a few seconds ... And with windows 95 it's even faster !

On the other hand, Arachne is not the only DOS web browser, dillo was ported to DOS six years ago and was renamed "dillodos". That one works a much better already (but may lack some features and requires beefier hardware, but judging by what you want to do, more oomph is not gonna hurt)

SirNickity wrote:

As for the file serving -- I would agree that an SD card is probably a better storage medium than trying to re-use old hard disks. I've calculated this out myself a few times and always arrived at the same conclusion: When 4TB drives are cheap and common, it stops making sense to aggregate piles of 500GB drives. I know you don't need nearly that much, which is all the more reason why the logistics of setting up a Pi with a USB hub, USB enclosures, and multiple spinning disks compared to a single SD-to-USB adapter that can hold it all with zero cabling and nearly zero power draw, makes no sense at all. A 32GB SD card with USB adapter will set you back $10 if you don't already have six of them propping up the corner of your keyboard. 😉 Just my 2c.

Well I've explained SD cards with my pi and ... Actually do NOT use them as storage device, they WILL corrupt. At least 3 SD cards have died in my pi ... They did not blow up or anything, they just got to the end of their cycles. You should move the filesystem to the HDD so once the pi has booted the SD card isn't being used anymore.

Having to go to the shop to buy a new SD card, backup the old one, reinstall everything because obviously things got corrupt and put back what had survived is not a fun experience. A HDD is much more solid and can be bought used for nothing. The last SD card that died was 64GB large and was full ... I went to a 160GB HDD after that. For now, everything's looking fine. If that gets too small, I'll just salvage another one from an old laptop or buy one somewhere else.

Has anyone had a Raspberry Pi die? I had one running continuously for three years without issues. It was finally taken down because I no longer needed it.

You should check out mTCP for MS-DOS. It provides DHCP support, along with a lot of other things like telnet, ftp client, ftp server, and other neat stuff. It runs on pretty much everything all the way back to an 8088.

http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/

You can also use it to make a DOS machine into a fileserver. All you need is a network card and the packet driver that goes along with it.

Did a quick search on DuckDuckGo for "DilloDOS"...

The... uhm... more reasonable?... results were things like "Dillards"... the less reasonable ones... referenced sex toys.

Just an FYI...

Huh !? Well ... there it is https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2011/1 … rowser-for-dos/

Sorry for that x)

SanDisk High Endurance microSD seems to be a good choice for RPi:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic. … art=25#p1421691

Also some tweaks can be done to extend cards's lifespan like moving logs to tmpfs (RAM disk), using the noatime mount flag, etc.