Crafting TCP/IP DOS Boot Disks for Retro Networking Adventures

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THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR

Күн бұрын

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@johnvanwinkle4351 2 ай бұрын

I like your “advanced” startup file configuration for the boot disks. Great idea!

@mudi2000a 3 ай бұрын

Interesting that there also was a Trumpet TCP/IP stack for DOS. I only knew Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1

@chrislowe3799 3 ай бұрын

I created a fully automatic network boot disk for a large enterprise customer back in about 1996 to support unattended Windows NT 4.0 network builds. The trick to auto-detecting network cards was to simply loop through each available driver until one loads (checking ERRORLEVEL value after load attempt), and from there you could continue to load the network stack. This worked for both ODI and NDIS-based DOS drivers. I compressed both the network stack and NIC drivers into two ZIPs to maximize diskette capacity, and extracted them into a RAMDrive (although I probably extracted the drivers one by one).

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

Makes sense. I'm thinking to extend my floppies with a RAM disk as well to speed things up. I'm prepared for it, as I'm using the config.sys startup menu functions. No option though for those old IBM PCs I have, as they barely exceed 640k of RAM.

@myne00 3 ай бұрын

Same. But for Norton Ghost - because we'd reimage entire rooms at the school I worked at. Side note, 16mb is about as small as you can make windows 95a + mstsc for a room of 2k terminal services thin clients. Got an extra couple of years out of those 486 and Pentiums.

@geoffpool7476 3 ай бұрын

Awesome Video! I have used mTCP for a very long time, but I love your automation and scripting process. Thank you for sharing! New subscriber and looking forward to the next video!

@SobieRobie 3 ай бұрын

Very interesting video and a great job!

@BillyBlazeTheKeenest 3 ай бұрын

I like your new revised intro. :)

@BandanazX 3 ай бұрын

Nobody ran TCP/IP on _LAN_ in the DOS days. RFC1918 wasn't even codified until 1996, and the earliest use of 'link-local' addressing didn't happen until about 1997, and wasn't codified until 2005. Even Win9x LAN networking was mostly IPX/SPX until the prevalence of 'always on' internet services using DSL or Cable modem. Prior to that you would run IPX/SPX and maybe NetBEUI locally, and wouldn't bind TCP/IP to your Ethernet adapter. All the DOS games required IPX/SPX and Novell was the predominant fileserver. I get that there is a level of convenience in having TCP/IP on DOS in the modern era, but realistically a Novell or LANMAN type setup makes much more sense within the scope of DOS.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

Thank you for your thoughtful comment! You're absolutely right that TCP/IP wasn't the dominant protocol for LANs in the DOS era. IPX/SPX, primarily associated with Novell NetWare, was however. Though, I think it’s also important to highlight why I chose to focus on TCP/IP in my video. I began with Windows for Workgroups and NetBEUI in a virtualized environment a few weeks ago, and so it seemed logical building a physical network. My professional career startet in the mid 90s, and all I ever built was TCP/IP networks, and if anything, transitional multi-protocol networks for the sole purpose of killing-off IPX/SPX. As I'm going back to build a contemporary 10BASE2 network using gear of questionable origins and yet unknown functional state, for me, coming from a TCP/IP world, it's easier for me to get the right tooling to begin with, and that's TCP/IP. Why? Because it helps me asserting that the layer 1 through 3 are indeed working using methodologies I known, before jumping into largely unknown-land like Novell und Banyan, with driver madness, protocols I never worked with, and whatever else may go wrong. I had my share of unexplainable malfunctions with NetBEUI already when looking into Windows for Workgroups 3.1, although that was propably owed to some emulation quirk. But before going into unknown-land with my physical gear, I rather have the level of confidence, my gear is working correctly. And I can tell you, that I ran into one broken network card, and these DOS TCP/IP boot disks I made help me in pinpointing this. As a side-effect, I think it's still valuable to show that DOS can be adapted to TCP/IP. That said, I completely agree that for an authentic 1980s or early 1990s setup, IPX/SPX and NetBEUI are much more representative of the period. LAN Manager and Novell are on my exploration shortlist, so also accurate depication of network technology will be shown here. Thanks again for your input-it's great to be able to have these discussions and explore different aspects of retro computing!

@BandanazX 3 ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR You can load the IPXODI driver and have everything you need to do proper DOS LAN gaming. Easy to install/configure as IPX is auto addressing. I've been lazy but I'm looking into having a a SAMBA server with IPXSPX on Linux but that's a bit of a dark art. Looking forward to your next video.

@NiceCakeMix 3 ай бұрын

Really nice video, i remember having to do this back in the 90s at work so its good to see it again as after all these years i have forgotten how all the steps went.

@idahofur 3 ай бұрын

I don't think I did any tcp/ip floppies back in the day. But, I did setup some netbeui (I think that is correct.) to connect to a wfw share for a POS. Ah, yes the dos client that came with Windows nt server. :) I also did Novell ipx boot disk and of course boot roms.

@alterhund4116 3 ай бұрын

It's nice that you're dealing with this 40-year-old stuff. We had Novel servers. Plus print server. At the time 1988 (???) No printers at workstations. IO cards. The parell interface was disabled and the IRQ 7 was used. I'm already looking forward to the next video. Everything was connected via the Novell server. There was WSGEN or with Win for Workgroup the whole thing was installed by itself (almost😃). Funny times. Kind regards from Unterfranken.

@8randomprettysecret8 3 ай бұрын

Nice distinction! Cool to see the various driver configurations. Thanks for sharing 🖥️⌨️💾

@_chrisr_ 3 ай бұрын

I remember putting together boot disks for windows 3.11, where windows did the packet driver but we had netbeui available on the dos boot to get windows from the network

@Coburn64 3 ай бұрын

Great video! It's awesome to see DOS machines being able to chatter to other boxes on the network. I never tried to get DOS talking on a network myself - although I guess the DOS running inside Windows 9x could count, since I've used it to ping a few hosts when testing LAN connectivity - but this has given me a new idea next time I bring out the retro box.

@AlexanderWeurding 2 ай бұрын

Epic! Next a IPX Network over a NULL Modem cable :P .Thanks for sharing this!

@m1k3e 3 ай бұрын

Well done! 👏

@RetroTechChris 3 ай бұрын

Love it! So many great topics covered in under 20 minutes, how do you do it, impressive!!

@paulstubbs7678 3 ай бұрын

Looks kind of good, I wouldnt mind trying that here, however you skipped over a fair bit and you probided little info on where any of your utils and configs came from. Will you be making any of this avaliable? There didn't seem to be anything in links below your video

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

It's the first link in the video description, pointing you right away to my github repository. It's all there.

@Jerrec 3 ай бұрын

I also built a 10BASE2 network 2 weeks ago. And I connected it to my 100 Gigabit Core! :-) Useless but I did it because I could.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

I read 100 Gigabit. I read useless. I like it :-) Can't compete though, my home network runs only on 10G. ^^

@Jerrec 3 ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yeah I upgraded to a Mikrotik CRS520 Core and 2x CRS504 Switches on the Leaf at home. Got some pics if you are interested how a old IBM Hub is connected to a CRS504! 🙂 Honestly, I dont need it, but I wanted it.

@HTMLEXP 3 ай бұрын

Great work!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

@@HTMLEXP thx 🙏

@gstcomputing65 3 ай бұрын

I have a few Farallon Etherwave ISA cards from back in the day. They're great for retro computing since they are compatible with 3COM Etherlink III ISA cards which almost everyone supported.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

Are they as pricey as the 3COM ones? ISA NICs, and 3COMs in particular, are going for ridiculous prices these days on eBay ...

@gstcomputing65 2 ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I just did a cursory search on eBay. I only saw a few and hey are around $25 US. That seems pretty reasonable.

@cocusar 3 ай бұрын

Please make some image that can be boot trough PXE, I managed to install W98 doing a lot of weird stuff, nothing really worked out of the box. In particular when the disk wasn't already formatted in FAT32 and the loaded DOS through PXE was just 6.22.

@BandanazX 3 ай бұрын

PXE!?! That's not Phintage. Boot ROM on your NE2000 clones.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

@@BandanazX I did actually a lot of PXE boot, but agree, that‘s quiet modernish already, PXE wasn’t around until early 2000s. Boot ROMs would definitely be the way to go for 90s.

@netheritecraftondrugs5126 2 ай бұрын

Why is there 3 deleted videos in the legacynetwork playlist

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 2 ай бұрын

Because these were test uploads, forgot to remove them. Thx for the hint!

@netheritecraftondrugs5126 2 ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR np

@Nono-hk3is 3 ай бұрын

Because you used a /24 netmask rather than /16, you are not implementing link lical addressing (AutoIP) correctly. Your layer 3 topology will not be compatible with proper implementations of AutoIP. I'm sure it works for everything you want to do, but it's important for you and your audience to understand that when you change the netmask length, you are fundamentally changing the definition of the network. And in the case of AutoIP, you are violating the protocol. Again, that's fine, you can do whatever you want, but don't call it AutoIP or link local addressing.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

@Nono-hk3is That‘s correct. The choice came mostly from making a oneliner here in AUTOEXEC.BAT for the time: RANDOM 1,254 | NSET IP=169.254.0.$1 And this limits it to one octet, not the two needed. Though I‘m already rewriting parts of it to make it support the whole /16, as well as breaking stuff out from AUTOEXEC.BAT as it‘s too clunky.

@BandanazX 3 ай бұрын

Moreover I think that link-local 169.254.0.0/16 is completely unrouteable by design. You can't subnet it or any of that. It has to remain a /16 network. It's kind of weird using a semi modern network stack on archaic systems. Probably just stick with RFC1918 address space and everything will be happy.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

@@BandanazX Nah, that's not fully correct. Technically, the 169.254/16 prefix is not any different than other IP prefixes. It can be subnetted, and also routed. One should not do that, as the OP mentioned, it's supposed to be treated as a whole /16 in order to not break the APIPA, which I did in the original release. In the meantime I found a way to auto-assign the correct IP and /16 Netmask via AUTOEXEC.BAT. As you say, it *should* also not be routed. But as a fact, there's nothing prohibiting you to route that prefix like any other prefix. The reason it is not routed is because the policy so demands, which means, that network gateways must implement a drop-policy for so-called BOGONS (which includes RFC1918 prefixes, and some others). But a Cisco router for example doesn't do any kind of route filtering by default, so you can technically configure the 169.254/16 prefix on a connected interface, and route it.

@monad_tcp 2 ай бұрын

Is that a real problem? if you assign a mask for /16 but never use the other octet, that way it doesn't break the spec. But I bet subneting a network that's isolated on its own collision domain and it's not routable will never be a problem. Just SNAT traffic , muahahaaa

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 2 ай бұрын

@@monad_tcp well, for my use-case not really, as it was just intended for testing need. But as the OP postulated, of course it breaks the broadcast domain down, so when trying to feach a host outside the 169.254/24, it wouldn‘t work. But it‘s anyway absolete now, as I found an elegant way to implement the correct prefix in AUTOEXEC. BAT. So from standards compliancy pov it‘s now using the correct /16 netmask. But it‘s still not fully correct APIPA, as no collision checking is done.

@donwald3436 3 ай бұрын

I bought a Kali license to play Doom over modem lol.

@danielktdoranie 3 ай бұрын

Why not FreeDOS?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 3 ай бұрын

Nothing bad about FreeDOS, but I'm a child of this era, and my heart clings to MS-DOS and PC DOS ;-) There will be some FreeDOS showcase soon, as in fact, I do use it here and there as well.

@RETROMachines 2 ай бұрын

This is more usefull - kzbin.info/www/bejne/d6qzhKqFj7GLn9U

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 2 ай бұрын

That's pretty cool, yes! Like the DOSGPT part :) Though my intention was not, and will never be, to make it a univeral boot floppy. The floppy set I created is very specific for my needs in dealing with network card setup and diagnostics, plus it must work on all sorts of floppy disks between 360K to 1.44M to cover the broad variety of systems I have.