Trouble with netbooting freedos...

[Michael Robinson-12]

I've been net booting freedos to play battle tech I no problem.  
Even with a ramdisk though, I can't get battle tech II to work.
I picked up a packet driver for the D845PEBT2 built in nic, but
whether it's wget or lynx, trying to execute the application simply
causes the computer to reset.  Uge!  Network booting is nice if you
can network where dos is nice with say Linux filesystem support
because it's simple.  Microsoft client is what I need, but there
are no free ndis drivers for my built in Intel nic.  There are
no dos drivers for my AC97 sound card either.

Would someone pretty please replace Microsoft client with something
that works with crynwr style packet drivers?  Microsoft hasn't updated
Microsoft Client 3.0 in an inordinately long time.  It would be nice
if some of the more common network cards for which there are no NDIS
drivers worked in Freedos with a Microsoft client like app.

When I say network booted dos I mean that I'm actually loading it off
of a tftp server.

Microsoft Client 3.0 doesn't seem that complex.  I'm surprised the
makers of Samba haven't looked into producing an open source more
up to date freedos compatible alternative.  It would be nice if
freedos could run in higher resolution and a Microsoft client
clone could handle long file names.

Maybe if ReactOS stabilizes it will be possible to network boot it
and run it on a ram drive.


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[Eric Auer-3]

Hi Michael,

> I picked up a packet driver for the D845PEBT2 built in nic, but
> whether it's wget or lynx, trying to execute the application simply
> causes the computer to reset.

Maybe it helps to tell emm386 to not use any UMB, or maybe
it helps to load no emm386 at all? As you say you are using
netboot - it can be that you simply must not access the net
card from netboot and from DOS drivers at the same time. In
that case, it might help to first copy everything to ramdisk
and run DOS there, to make sure that the netboot file access
is not active / busy while you run networked DOS apps...

> Microsoft client is what I need, but there are no free ndis
> drivers for my built in Intel nic.

Does msclient need ndis? I believe there are wrappers which
turn ndis or odi drivers into packet drivers or the other
way round...

> Would someone pretty please replace Microsoft client with
> something that works with crynwr style packet drivers?

What you can try is the DOS port of SMBCLIENT. It is only a
"command line ftp client" user experience but it should be
enough to copy all the files that you need from the network
to a ramdisk. I am not aware of tools / drivers which can
run in the background and access SMB shares in DOS. Apart
from MS Client, of course.

> When I say network booted dos I mean that I'm actually loading it off
> of a tftp server.
>
> Microsoft Client 3.0 doesn't seem that complex.

Then I wonder why it uses such extreme amounts of RAM ;-)

> I'm surprised the makers of Samba haven't looked into producing
> an open source more up to date freedos compatible alternative.

As said above - somebody already compiled a DOS version of the
Samba smbclient. The problem is that a "running in the background
network drive driver" needs to be very DOS specific while the
"mount a Samba drive in Linux" driver is very Linux specific so
you cannot easily make a DOS version from the Linux driver...

Eric



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[tom ehlert]

>> I picked up a packet driver for the D845PEBT2 built in nic, but
>> whether it's wget or lynx, trying to execute the application simply
>> causes the computer to reset.

don't use EMM386

>> Microsoft client is what I need, but there are no free ndis
>> drivers for my built in Intel nic.



> Does msclient need ndis? I believe there are wrappers which
> turn ndis or odi drivers into packet drivers or the other
> way round...
seems you have no idea about msclient or ndis.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/detail_desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=4239
(prodos.exe) should support your board.

>> Would someone pretty please replace Microsoft client with
>> something that works with crynwr style packet drivers?
currently there are many more ndis drivers then packet drivers
available; though it's possible to turn a ndis driver into a packet driver

Tom


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[Michael Robinson-12]

I know about prodos.exe, it requires Windows to
extract the drivers from it and the drivers you
extract are probably Windows drivers.

An update on the reset problem, updating to kernel
2039 and dropping emm386 updating himem as well
seems to fix the problem.  Another advantage of
kernel 2039 is that one can fit more text on the
screen.  I use wget to load in programs to a
a ramdrive that I created via fdauto.bat.  The
wget I use is the latest version and I had to
add cwsdpmi to my 2.88 meg boot image.

I've tried various shareware games successfully:
commander keen1 and keen4, in search of dr. riptide,
pea shooting pete, and the non shareware game battle
tech I.

In addition to games, I've tried Arachne with mixed
results.  It doesn't work if I install it to C:\fdos1
even if I add that to the path variable.  It sort of
works if I add it to c:\.  For some reason, the mouse
goes nuts after a while.  Another problem is that I
want to use IMAP instead of pop3.

The next logical thing to try is adding ssh2dos to
the things I wget and install from fdauto.bat.  With
that, I can in theory log in to the tftp server and
change the netboot image.

I'd like to get battletech II working, but to do that
I need to fool it into thinking that it is installed
to a hard disk somehow.  Apparently, there is something
called memdisk that I need to do that.

I still want an alternative to Microsoft Client that
works with the Intel non NDIS packet driver for my
built in eexpress pro 10/100 fast ethernet card.
The alternative should be samba compatible and
unloadable/reloadable on demand.

How hard would it be to create a tsr that allows one
to use Linux network card drivers under freedos?  The
need to find a third party network card driver in this
day and age is a pain considering that Microsoft doesn't
support dos anymore and most commercial software outlets
don't either.


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[Bernd Blaauw]

Op 18-10-2009 19:12, Michael Robinson schreef:
> I know about prodos.exe, it requires Windows to
> extract the drivers from it and the drivers you
> extract are probably Windows drivers.
>    

should be a DOS Ndis driver in that, as well as packet driver. Ofcourse
also windows ndis drivers. Intel's drivers seem quite generic.

> An update on the reset problem, updating to kernel
> 2039 and dropping emm386 updating himem as well
> seems to fix the problem.  Another advantage of
> kernel 2039 is that one can fit more text on the
> screen.  I use wget to load in programs to a
> a ramdrive that I created via fdauto.bat.  The
> wget I use is the latest version and I had to
> add cwsdpmi to my 2.88 meg boot image.
>    
which Wget you're using? there's an ancient DOS port but wouldn't mind
more up to date version ported from GNU/Linux.

> In addition to games, I've tried Arachne with mixed
> results.  It doesn't work if I install it to C:\fdos1
> even if I add that to the path variable.  It sort of
> works if I add it to c:\.  For some reason, the mouse
> goes nuts after a while.  Another problem is that I
> want to use IMAP instead of pop3.
>    
No idea on these issues, though people in the past have made single
bootdisks containing a working Arachne as well.
> The next logical thing to try is adding ssh2dos to
> the things I wget and install from fdauto.bat.  With
> that, I can in theory log in to the tftp server and
> change the netboot image.
>    
I've used Wget to download CURL, then upload a modified file to my own
router's usb stick. Had no luck with HTGET uploading/downloading, or
Wget uploading. No experience with using FTP.EXE scripted either. Think
about 6 months ago someone wrote to this list mentioning a lightweight
TCP/IP stack.
> I'd like to get battletech II working, but to do that
> I need to fool it into thinking that it is installed
> to a hard disk somehow.  Apparently, there is something
> called memdisk that I need to do that.
>    
That might work if you can somehow create a harddisk image and populate
it with MBR and active formatted partition and bootfiles and your
game.Maybe SUBST instead or a Ramdisk C:?
> I still want an alternative to Microsoft Client that
> works with the Intel non NDIS packet driver for my
> built in eexpress pro 10/100 fast ethernet card.
> The alternative should be samba compatible and
> unloadable/reloadable on demand.
>    
I think SMBCLIENT which was mentioned earlier is the only program to
access SMB and possibly NFS shares, but it's no TSR
> How hard would it be to create a tsr that allows one
> to use Linux network card drivers under freedos?  The
> need to find a third party network card driver in this
> day and age is a pain considering that Microsoft doesn't
> support dos anymore and most commercial software outlets
> don't either.
>    
Sounds sheer impossible. What I do wonder though, which are the hardware
specific parts of packet drivers, and which generic? crynwr has
opensource ones, maybe new packet drivers could be written for new
networking cards.

As you're netbooting anyway, you're not limited to floppy images I
think, use harddisk images instead perhaps.QEMU should be able to make them.

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