tomsie1000 wrote:

Largely for my own amuesment, I've created a VM virtual 'appliance' that runs the server for EtherDFS with 'just enough OS' - hopefully this may make it easier for those who are not Linux/Unix people to try out EtherDFS. IMHO once it's working it's an awesome solution and I'm surprised there is still relatively little interest/coverage of it.

See http://tomsie.co.uk/ethersrv/ for info etc

Hello, and thank you for your interest in EtherDFS! I'm glad to see it is useful outside of my basement. I do think that EtherDFS is an awesome solution, but obviously I am biased :)
It is true it doesn't generate much coverage/interest - I am not sure why. Perhaps it being a "network" thingy it scares most hobbyists.

I see that you enforce lower-case names through samba - this is probably not a very good approach. It would be best to rely on the filesystem for that: simply create a fat image (fallocate + mkfs.vfat), and then mount it:
mount -t vfat -o loop,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=437

BTW, another cool "turnkey" appliance would be a version for RaspberryPi - this would allow people to run a mini "NAS" for DOS with EtherDFS. Just write the image on an SD card and boot it up.

What's the advantage of this over FreeNAS? Smaller footprint? FreeNAS works well for my needs and still supports SMB1 so until that's dropped I should be good.

DosFreak wrote:

What's the advantage of this over FreeNAS? Smaller footprint? FreeNAS works well for my needs and still supports SMB1 so until that's dropped I should be good.

Is your SMB solution able to run on a no-NIC 8086 with 256K of total memory? EtherDFS is.

EtherDFS (http://etherdfs.sourceforge.net) has several advantages over SMB in DOS:
- much more memory efficient (7K TSR)
- much easier to set up ("etherdfs :: c-x")
- does not need any IP/IPX stack (only a barebone packet driver), thus works even on minimal configurations

I was referring more to the server side vs FreeNAS rather than the client. Windows 9x-Windows 10 support SMB1, Linux supports SMB1, FreeBSD supports SMB1. For computers without a NIC in most cases you just add a NIC or remove the SD card or HD to transfer files so that's likely why you don't see more interest as far as retro users. It does look useful though.