It's suboptimal, but I have a chroot with a buildchain on that thing.

I'll use it to build natively from source later.

This is my card

AlessandroB wrote on Yesterday, 11:37:

This is my card

The 3C509B is well supported and has DOS drivers for almost every use case. You'll find all of them listed here: https://packetdriversdos.net/

Depending on what network software you intend to use you may need a different driver - either ODI, NDIS or plain old DOS packet driver. But they are all there.

If you're against using mTCP and NetDrive which are perfectly good suggestions, I also say the next best thing is to use Windows for Workgroups with its built-in networking features. This is how I have all of my vintage systems networked except the 286 which can't run WfW and it works well. For my 286 I am using the MS DOS Network Client 3.0 which consumes a few hundred KB of conventional memory (takes me from 560K down to 230k). It's a hog but it works.

The ms client for dos *will* use upper memory if available, it's just that it wants huge chunks of contiguous upper memory.

For my gigabit intel (built into my old as dirt nuc, which is supported by sbemu), the dos ndis2 driver alone *demands* a full 64k segment just for itself. No compromises. The tcpip driver then wants about 52k-ish upper memory, and then a few bits must be in low memory.

I have about 550k free after getting the stack loaded.

Filthy.

I would like netdrive server to run as a daemon on my crappy nas, so I can use that and the packet driver instead.

(The combination will let me keep linux on there, add a 1.44mb floppy image and memdisk to my /boot folder and drop a grub entry for 'dos', then boot that image as a virtual floppy diskette, load the packet driver and other needful, load netdrive, and keep persistence on the nas.)

(I need to build netdrive for armv7l first though.)

Out of curiosity, I tried to start Win 3.11 and it immediately recognized the 3com card and asked me if I wanted to install the... drivers? Then it asked me what I think are the services to activate but there I stopped.

Every time I restart Win3.11 it tells me that the network drivers have not been loaded and to check the network configuration... but I have not done much other than what it asked me when it detected the 3com

Yes, Microsoft Network Client for MS-DOS does use a lot of RAM.
But - when using it with a Windows XP server - it should be possible to use IPX protocol, which uses less memory than TCP/IP.

Also, no need to load Microsoft Network Client from CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT - just move all the commands to a separate .BAT, and only load it when necessary.

Back in the day, I used to use this little gem:

http://ftp.carnet.hr/pub/pub/pc/networking/NeOS/

It is a very small full networking package for DOS, using a packet driver for the NIC interface - but I don't know of any
implementations for other OS. You might be able to get it to work within a V.M. on a more modern host.

Can do shared folders, but in a bit of a different way - instead of drives/folders representing each mounted share,
It gives a single folder representing ALL mounter shares. Top level of this folder contains folders representing the
mounter shares.

Here is a good guide on how to install networking on a Windows 3.11 machine from scratch
As you already have windows you can skip the beginning and start from here
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=495913#p495913

Doesn't sound like you need them but the driver disk is the 3C5X9X.EXE file from here
http://r3tr0.de/mirror/ftp.mpoli.fi/hardware/ … 3COM/index.html

You will also need the windows TCP/IP disk from here
https://archive.org/details/Win3.11TCPIP

When asked for a username and workgroup make sure you enter the same as your XP machine, this will make sharing much easier down the track.
You can use File Manager to create the drive mapping.

Be aware once TCP/IP is installed windows take a long time if it cant find a DHCP server, You can get around this by typing win/n which will disable networking for that session.