EtherDFS and DOS packet drivers

 A good while back, I ordered an ISA network card for my socket-5 Pentium machine.  Finally today I managed to get it working with EtherDFS.  Finding the right steps involved a lot of web searching.

First, I had to figure out exactly what model the card was.  Thankfully, it says it right on the chip: RTL8019AS.  I have spewed much bile about Realtek and their crappy audio drivers before now, but I was seriously impressed that they still had a page where I could download the packet driver for this ancient NIC.

As far as I can tell, there are two types of NIC drivers for DOS-era machines: an NDIS type for Windows things, and a 'packet' driver with an open interface.  EtherDFS needs the packet drivers, and I don't care for Windows guff, so I'm happy with just that.

I found a page at legroom.net which had the info I needed to install the packet driver.  That page has a whole wealth of stuff, but the bit I needed told me to save the packet driver (pnppd.com for me) in the DOS folder and add a line to autoexec.bat to make sure it gets loaded: loadhigh C:\dos\pnppd.com 0x60

Running that seemed to work, so next it was etherdfs!

The client-side software can be downloaded directly (no build required).  I just copied into the DOS folder on my Pentium's CF drive.

The server-side needed me to type 'make'.  Seriously - just that.  No dependencies, no immense long build-time.  I even triple-checked the build output, but it was just a few warnings, no errors.

The server docs contained the commands I needed to make a DOS image and mount it on my Ubuntu box:

     fallocate -l 1024M fat.img
   mkfs.msdos fat.img
   sudo mount -o loop fat.img /mnt/fat

(although I went with 128M rather than a full gig)

Then, to run the server, I used:

sudo ./ethersrv-linux -f enp1s0 /mnt/fat

Next, I used ip addr to give me the MAC address of the enp1s0 NIC, and on the DOS box, connected up the E drive with the command:

etherdfs <server mac address here> C-E /q

Then, if I created a test text file in /mnt/fat on the Ubuntu box, I could view it on the DOS box.  I then edited it on the DOS box and saved it...and the changes were immediately visible on the Ubuntu box!  MAGIC! :D

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