First post, by wondow
Because of the great work from the retro-computing community, it is now very convenient to share a live filesystem (not disk images) between a modern computer and a DOS machine. Tools such as EtherDFS and Netmount work extremely well and are very useful for DOS and have a very low memory footprint. These are great.
The difficult part has always been Windows 9x and NT 3.x/4.0/2000. Yes, it is possible to use a Samba1 share, FTP, serial transfer, CDs, USB flash drives, CF cards, or even floppies. But these methods are far less convenient.
It is also possible to use EtherDFS or Netmount with Windows 9x. I have had good success doing so (excluding Windows ME). The DOS packet driver and the EtherDFS/Netmount driver can be loaded in AUTOEXEC.BAT before starting Windows, and they will continue to function inside Windows, but only if the Windows Ethernet driver is disabled (or not installed). So, if you also want to use Windows networking (for example IPX games), you need a second Ethernet card dedicated to Windows.
Recently I discovered another very useful piece of software: VBADOS, which basically provides VirtualBox guest additions for DOS. One program included is VBSF.EXE, a shared folder driver allowing DOS to map host directories as drive letters.
As an experiment, I set up a FreeDOS 1.4 virtual machine using VBSF.EXE with a shared folder connected to the host (Linux Mint in that case). I then installed Microsoft Workgroup Add-On for MS-DOS using the NDIS driver PCNTND for the VirtualBox Am79C973 network card (available here: https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/?page_id=575) and installed the full redirector.
To my surprise, I was able to share the VirtualBox shared folder from DOS, and Windows 9x and NT 3.x/NT4/2000 systems could connect to it and read/write files normally. Just make sure that the NetBEUI protocol is installed on the Windows client.
A modern host system can now safely expose a native Windows/Linux share to legacy Windows systems without SMB1 support on the host with the FreeDOS virtual machine as a bridge.